Death is the one ineradicable fact of being human. How we think about it is central to our understanding of and engagement with the world. Our human and cultural construction of death and dying shapes the structure and purpose of our institutions and has underpinned the work of scholars and philosophers down the ages. In its organization and values, its form and content, its construction of the past and of the future, the relationship between law and mortality remains one of the most perplexing and under-theorized aspects of the legal system, whether dealing with AIDS, euthanasia, sadomasochism, “mercy killings,” murder, the judicial review of the right to die, or the criminal death sentence. This timely and important collection brings together scholars from Australia, Britain and the United States to reconsider the relationship between death and the law, in ways that will be of particular interest to post-structural philosophers and legal theorists and to cultural theorists and practitioners in a much wider field, for whom there is nothing more certain than the existence of “death and taxes.” Contributors, and their university or col