Concerns about the cost and environmental consequences of the "traditional" American model of burial-embalming, casket, vault, single perpetual grave-are prompting the first significant challenges to American disposition practices since the Civil War. Burial itself is even being challenged-the popularity of cremation has exploded in recent decades and it will soon become the dominant practice. Americans eager to innovate in deathcare find that the law-still heavily rooted in 17th century English, Protestant practices and beliefs-is ill-equipped to adapt. Cemetery law in the United States has changed little in the past 200 years, but the challenges to our disposition practices are so widespread and significant that it will soon have no choice. It is unimaginable that we will start with a clean slate. Instead, the law will, as it always does in a common law system, slowly evolve from its current form. Before we can change the law, we must first understand it. This book is designed to help jumpstart that process by outlining the history, structure, and doctrines of the common law of burying grounds in the United States.
About the Author: Tanya D. Marsh is a graduate of Indiana University-Bloomington (B.A. in history and political science) and Harvard Law School. She practiced law in Indianapolis for ten years before joining the faculty at the Wake Forest University School of Law in 2010. Marsh developed and began teaching the first course on funeral and cemetery law in an American law school in 2013. She has been elected to the membership of the American Law Institute and the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, and is an active leader in the American Bar Association-Real Property Trust and Estate Law Section and the Association of American Law Schools. Marsh is nationally recognized for her work in the law of human remains and cemetery law. She is the author of articles on the subject that have been published in the Wake Forest Law Review, the Real Property Trust and Estate Law Journal, and The Huffington Post. Marsh is the author of the first treatise on funeral and cemetery law since 1950-THE LAW OF HUMAN REMAINS (2015). Marsh is a licensed funeral director in the State of California. Daniel Gibson is a graduate of Campbell University (B.A. in government) and a 2015 graduate of Wake Forest University School of Law.