Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions, MARC TRABSKY, London: Routledge, 2019, 142 pp., £36.99
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | CARSON COLE ARTHUR |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12291 |
DOI: ./j ols.
BOOK REVIEW
Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and
Institutions
MARC TRABSKY
London: Routledge, , pp., £.
For too long, death studies has failed to attend to the ways in which legal institutions manage,
order, and represent the dead. Throughout Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institu-
tions, his historical account of Coroner’s Courts in Australia,Marc Trabsky speaks to death studies
and legal studies and encourages both to consider one another more seriously. As Trabsky puts
it, his book ‘makes an intervention into the historiography of death’ (p. ). In a Foucauldian
manner, he examines the technologies of this coronial institution. According to his account, the
coroner attaches the dead to the law, from which they exercise their authority in maintaining and
sustaining their duty, conduct, and responsibility. If death studies and legal studies are to bring
their attention to coronial studies, or to the law and the dead more broadly, it is crucial that they
explore conduct as a key modality of legal authority to regulate the living and the dead, as Trabsky
brilliantly illustrates in his book.
It is difficult to demarcate the coroner from their court (after all, it is called the Coroner’s Court)
and their office. To speak of the coroner is to invoke their court (the court that acts as their office);
moreover, to speak of the Coroner’s Court calls to the coroner. It is precisely within this multi-
valence in the relation between the coroner and their court that fealty and probity arise – quali-
ties and qualifications that Trabsky attributes principally to the jurisdiction of coronial law. As he
demonstrates, spatial, optical, and archival technologies in the form of bodily movement (Chapter
), the glass screen (Chapter ), manuals (Chapter ), and records (Chapter ) enable the coroner
to perform and carry out their duty and embody faithful, lawful, and ‘ethical’ conduct.
With the abolition of the law of deodands in England in the nineteenth century, the coroner
created and acquired new types of legal devices or technologies that aided their work. These tech-
nologies were not solely the property of the coroner but an amalgamation of different relations to
other juridical, civic, and medical officials, bodies, and fields. Moreover, these technologies were
not just designed for the living but were also imposed upon the dead – as they continue to be
today.That is, technologies secured and maintained the relation between the living and the dead,
by attaching the dead to the law.
What makes Australia,an outpost of the British Empire, unique in this regard is that the coroner
played an important role in the dispossession of land from Indigenous people. Unfortunately,
one weakness of the book is that Trabsky does not explore this in depth. There is no mention
of the Native Police force and its connection to the ‘frontier management’ of Australian settler
© The Author.Journal of Law and Society © Cardiff University Law School
J. Law Soc. ;:–. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols 283
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