The government of the dead in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to a new arrangement of thanato-politics in the West. Legal, medical and bureaucratic institutions developed innovative technologies for managing the dead, maximising their efficacy and exploiting their vitality. This project explores a history of the institutional life of the dead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

With a particular focus on the technologies of the death investigation process, including place-making, the forensic gaze, bureaucratic manuals, record-keeping and radiography, the project examines how the dead came to be incorporated into legal institutions in the modern era. Drawing on the writings of philosophers, historians and legal theorists, the project offers conceptual tools for thinking through how the dead dwell in law, how their lives persist through the conduct of office, and how coroners assume responsibilities for taking care of the dead.

This project challenges conventional thinking about the sequestration of the dead in the West and asks us to think through and with legal institutions when writing a history of the dead. By conceptualising law as a network of institutions, relations and technologies, it shows how coroners assumed responsibility for taking care of the dead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is meaningful for tracing how they take care of the dead today.

Outcomes of the project include the publication of Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019), which was awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2019, and shortlisted for the Australian Legal Research Awards Book Category in 2020.