The governance 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. Law and the Dead writes a history of their institutional life 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, this book 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, it offers tools for thinking through how the dead dwell in law, how their lives persist through the conduct of office, and how coroners assume responsibility for taking care of the dead. This historical and interdisciplinary book offers a provocative challenge to conventional thinking about the sequestration of the dead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks the reader to think through and with legal institutions when writing a history of the dead, and to trace the important role assumed by coroners in the governance of the dead. This book will be of interest to scholars working in law, history, sociology and criminology.

Marke, Julius J., Editor. A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University With Selected Annotations. New York: The Law Center of New York University, 1953. xxxi, 1372 pp. Reprinted 1999 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-19939. ISBN 1-886363-91-9. Cloth. $195. * Reprint of the massive, well-annotated catalogue compiled by the librarian of the School of Law at New York University. Classifies approximately 15,000 works excluding foreign law, by Sources of the Law, History of Law and its Institutions, Public and Private Law, Comparative Law, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Political and Economic Theory, Trials, Biography, Law and Literature, Periodicals and Serials and Reference Material. With a thorough subject and author index. This reference volume will be of continuous value to the legal scholar and bibliographer, due not only to the works included but to the authoritative annotations, often citing more than one source. Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies 3461.