Law and Death: School of Law academic is editor for landmark handbook
Dr Imogen Jones has just published a new edited collection: The Routledge Handbook of Law and Death.
Dr Imogen Jones’ and Dr Marc Trabsky’s edited Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on the intersections of law and death in the 21st century.
The Handbook is the first of its kind, bringing together prominent academics and emerging experts from a diverse range of disciplines. It shows how, far from shunning questions of mortality, legal institutions incessantly talk about death. Touching upon the epistemologies and materialities of death, and problems of contested deaths and posthumous harms, the Handbook questions what is distinctive about the disciplinary alignment of law and death, how law regulates and manages death in the everyday, and how thinking with law can enrich our understandings of the presence of death in our lives.
In a time when the world is facing global inequalities in living and dying, and legal institutions are increasingly interrogating their relationships to death, this Handbook makes for essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in law, humanities, and the social sciences.
Dr Jones says:
It has been a privilege to work with such a diverse and inspirational group of scholars from around the world. The collection highlights just how important this emerging field is for understanding and, hopefully, improving a world so often fractured by violence, inequality and death. I am excited to continue to promote and collaborate with my colleagues in this field.
With the support of the School of Law, a launch event attended by several UK and EU contributors was held in Leeds on 6th January 2025. Through a series of papers, the launch considered how important law and legal processes are to our responses to death.
Dr Jones is a member of the Centre for Innovation and Research in Legal Education, the Centre for Law and Social Justice and the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies.
For more information about her work, visit her website: Dead Bodies and the Law.
