Book Review: Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions

What Trabsky does in a particularly skillful fashion is attend to how the 652 Law, Culture and the Humanities 17(3) activities coroners perform that make them seem like lowly administrators or attendants to medical technicians actually serve to bolster their juridical authority. Trabsky supports this claim by tracing these mundane activities as they figure in legal history. Trabsky’s sense of responsibility to the practical and formal dimensions of the office of the coroner enables Trabsky to explore the materiality of the institutional life of law. Trabsky asks readers “to conceive of law in terms of the materiality of its institutions, the technologies that attach themselves to institutional practices and the performances of office that sustain the vitality of legal institutions” (8). Each chapter is concerned with a particular coronial technology and approach to the law. Chapter one concerns the early legal institutionalization of the care of the dead through public displays of the office. The coronial practices of walking with and “hawking” the dead in order to locate suitable places to conduct inquests are framed as technologies of jurisdiction. Chapter two offers a historical account of late nineteenth century transformations in techniques for viewing the corpse. According to Trabsky, what is conventionally understood as a mode of seeing is better understood as a matter of the authority to see. The coroner exercised a unique capacity for the juridical rhetoric of prosopopoeia (i.e. speaking as a thing) which allowed them to demonstrate their unique aptitude for the forensic gaze. Thus, in spite of the potential for encroachment upon their jurisdiction by medical professionals, coroners were able to maintain their juridical role in relation to the dead. Chapter three investigates how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the coronial manual functioned as a technology of office. Offering guidance about how to fulfill the obligations of the coroner’s office and interpret the scope of their jurisdiction, these manuals aided in the formation of a particular logic of office, shaped by the interests of the coroners who wrote them. Chapter four treats the technology of the file as an integral part of the modernization of the coroner’s court at the turn of the twentieth century and focuses on the bureaucratic aspect of coroner’s juridical status. The fifth and final chapter of the book takes account of how the mechanization of the forensic gaze by the technology of radiography impacted the coroner’s domain of expertise and practices of caring for the dead. Trabsky’s analyses of the technologies and performances of the coroner situate the coronial office in the realm of the tangible, sensate, spatial, and particular. For example, Trabsky spends the first chapter of the book describing the adventures of the itinerant coroner. A quasi-mythic figure, this early iteration of the coronial office seems to roam through colonial-era Australian cities and towns to attend to fresh or newly discovered corpses and claim appropriate places to conduct inquests. On one occasion in 1852, in the town of Prahran, today a suburb of Melbourne, an outhouse served to store the deceased. One can imagine the coroner, upright and upstanding, as his ward, a corpse, lies prostrate beside him, reeking in the hot Antipodean sun. In want of “a proper place, and a proper building” (37), i.e. conditions approximate to those available to coroners in the metropole, the coroner and his corpse-companion’s similar, though more malodorous, out-of-place-ness reveal what has been obscured—the sustained use of coronial legal authority to order the dead. In each chapter, Trabsky’s genealogy of the coroner draws the legal relations with the dead out of their quiet and familiar place, disturbing what might have been taken for granted about coronial law, and placing its common law roots into surroundings where it can mingle with the practices which make up its soil.