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This piece reviews the book, "Immortality and the Law (The Rising Power of the American Dead)" (Yale University Press, 2010), by Ray D. Madoff, Professor of Law at Boston College School of Law. The book examines three areas of American law dealing with one's power to maintain a form of control after death -- the distribution of property; the use of the personal body; and the interests in privacy, publicity, and royalties. Professor Madoff examines how American law differs in many surprising ways from the laws of most other countries. She particularly points out the trouble created by the concentration of wealth for long periods of time made possible by the repeal in many jurisdictions of the rule against perpetuities. The author's skillful use of interesting cases and examples brings exuberant life to what many would view as a “dead subject.”
Immortality and the Law reflects upon the cultural observation that death itself is ''un-American'' and argues, persuasively, that recent law reform has shifted an historical balance between the living and the dead unevenly and unambiguously in favor of the latter. Madoff's hypothesis asserts that power over property interests -- in the forms of donor-imposed restrictions on private property, postmortem publicity rights, rights to intellectual property, and gifts in trust for charitable purposes rather than outright bequests -- vests the dead with unprecedented control at the cost of enjoyment by the living, giving new strength to the apparently unquenchable desire for immortality.
This book takes a riveting look at how the law responds to that distinctly American dream of immortality. While American law provides virtually no protections for the interests we hold most dear—our bodies and our reputations—when it comes to property interests, the American dead have greater control than anywhere else in the world. Moreover, these rights are growing daily. From grave robbery to Elvis impersonators, Madoff shows how the law of the dead has a direct impact on how we live. Madoff examines how the rising power of the American dead enables the deceased to exert control over their wealth forever through grandiose schemes like "dynasty trusts" and perpetual private charitable foundations and to control their creative works and identities well into the unforeseeable future. Madoff explores how the law of the dead can, in essence, extend the reach of life by granting virtual immortality to individuals. All of this comes, Madoff contends, at real costs imposed on the living.
Within the philanthropic sector, as never before, time is of the essence. That is, temporal considerations—questions of intergenerational ethics, of the merits of giving now versus giving later, of the benefits and perils of perpetuity—have gained greatly in prominence. Bringing together the most esteemed contemporary scholars of philanthropy, Giving in Time provides the first sustained analysis of the complex issues surrounding the temporal dimensions of voluntary giving. Incorporating the perspectives of political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and philosophers, the contributors tackle critical questions confronting a new generation of philanthropists in a way that will appeal to academics and practitioners. They take on questions such as: What are the historical and moral foundations for establishing perpetual foundations? What are the leading challenges to philanthropic perpetuity? What is the significance of the recent trend toward “Giving While Living,” the calls to give not through bequests but in one’s lifetime? What are the ethical arguments for giving now rather than giving later? What is a giver’s responsibility to his current moment in time versus his obligation to the future? How does the legal framework supporting and structuring philanthropic practice shape approaches toward giving in time? How should it?
In this thought-provoking book, Peter Moore examines the often overlooked issues concerning human mortality, the fragile ways in which the dead can be said to “live on” in earthly terms: through their children, their work, the memories of others, their possessions, and even their bodies. Such earthly immortalities raise a host of fascinating questions about our attitudes toward life, and toward the world we leave behind us when we die. To what extent does the meaning we find in our lives depend upon the assumption there will always be a new generation to continue the human adventure? What would it be like if science were able to extend life indefinitely, and is this something already enshrined in the doctrine of reincarnation? Can we solve our anxieties about mortality by learning that life is worth living precisely because we do not live forever? In a generous and eloquent account, these and more are the questions Earthly Immortalities seeks to answer.
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.
The practice of philanthropy, which releases private property for public purposes, represents in many ways the best angels of our nature. But this practice's noteworthy virtues often obscure the fact that philanthropy also represents the exercise of private power. In The Tyranny of Generosity, Theodore Lechterman shows how this private power can threaten the foundations of a democratic society. The deployment of private wealth for public ends may rival the authority of communities to determine their own affairs. And, in societies characterized by wide disparities in wealth, philanthropy often combines with background inequalities to make public decisions overwhelmingly sensitive to the preferences of the rich. Allowing private wealth to dictate social outcomes collides with core commitments of a democratic society, a society in which people are supposed to determine their common affairs together, on equal terms. But why exactly is democracy valuable? How should these values be weighed against the liberty of donors and the many social benefits that philanthropy promises? Lechterman explores these questions by examining various topics in the practice of philanthropy: the respective roles of philanthropy and government, public subsidies for private giving, the use of donations for political speech, instruments of perpetual giving, the rise in giving by commercial corporations, and "effective altruism" as a guide for individual giving. These studies build to a surprising conclusion: realizing the democratic ideal may be impossible without philanthropy--but making philanthropy safe for democracy also requires fundamental changes to policy and practice.
In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to provide institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book provides an exhaustive overview of the most important institutional proposals as well as a systematic and theoretical discussion of their respective features and advantages. It focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of future generations more seriously, and does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what our institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today's excessive short-termism.
The troubling ethics and politics of philanthropy Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today’s democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society’s benefit, Just Giving shows how such generosity not only isn’t the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values. Big philanthropy is often an exercise of power, the conversion of private assets into public influence. And it is a form of power that is largely unaccountable and lavishly tax-advantaged. Philanthropy currently fails democracy, but Rob Reich argues that it can be redeemed. Just Giving investigates the ethical and political dimensions of philanthropy and considers how giving might better support democratic values and promote justice.
Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond-a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences-is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes. As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.