Posted: September 22nd, 2016 | By: Lisa Snedeker
The Wake Forest Journal of Law and Policy will present the symposium, “Disrupting the Death Care Paradigm: Challenges to the Regulation of the Funeral Industry and the American Way of Death,” on Friday, Feb. 24, 2017, in the Worrell Professional Center, Room 1312. The event is free and open to the public. Up to four hours of free Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit has been approved by the North Carolina Bar. The event will be live webcast.
Professor Tanya Marsh, who literally wrote the books on funeral and cemetery laws, says there have been a number of academic conferences addressing death and death care, “but this symposium is unique because it is focused on the very active legal, political and grassroots challenges to the funeral industry and the dominant paradigm of death care in this country.”
There are two main fronts of challenge to the existing paradigm – first, from those primarily concerned with the occupational licensing regime that shapes the funeral industry and the choices available to the public (i.e. court challenges to the casket laws and the ready to embalm laws); and second, from those primarily concerned with promoting new methods of memorialization and disposition.
Caitlin Doughty, a funeral director, well-known voice in the Death Positivist movement and the author of a New York Times best-selling book on this topic, will also give a keynote address at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017.
Other speakers will include:
- Lee Webster, President of National Home Funeral Alliance and member of Board of Directors of the Green Burial Council, http://homefuneralalliance.
org/about/board-of-directors/ - Josh Slocum, Executive Director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, https://www.funerals.org/
- Jeff Rowes, Senior Attorney at Institute for Justice, http://ij.org/staff/
jrowes/ - David Harrington, Economist at Kenyon College, http://www.kenyon.
edu/directories/campus- directory/biography/david- harrington/ - Philip Olson, Professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, http://www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/
facultydetails.php?id=55 - Amy Cunningham, Fitting Tribute Funeral Services, https://
theinspiredfuneral.com/about/ - Lee-ford Tritt, Director of the Center for Estate Planning and Director of the Estate Planning Practice Certificate Program at University of Florida Levin College of Law, https://www.law.ufl.edu/
faculty/lee-ford-tritt
