Posthumous interest in the גאל הדם‎ legal tradition

Scholarly reasons for the existence of the גאל הדם‎ institution tend to pool around the interests of three parties: the family or clan of the dead person, the Israelite people en masse, and the land those people possess. There is, however, another party with an interest in the death of the murderer, and that is the murdered person. To suggest that the dead have an interest in the execution of their killer is to argue for a belief in posthumous interests, a position here defended with reference to Israelite interment practice, and to Mesopotamian and Israelite beliefs about the dead and the violently dead.

Prawo – osoba – śmierć. Część II: Teoria Daniela Sperlinga a polski system prawny

This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, which was published in 2018, we presented arguments in support of the concept of posthumous interests. Posthumous interests are understood as events that constitute a benefit or a harm to the deceased person, who no longer exists. A right is the interest of a person, which is recognized and protected by law. In the second part, we examine the possibility of applying the theory of posthumous interests in the Polish legal system. We address the following issues: medical confidentiality, protection of medical data after the death of a patient, author’s moral rights, protection of the memory of the deceased, the law on orders and decorations, and the legal status of human corpses. The theoretical background for this article was the book by Daniel Sperling Posthumous Interest, in which the author outlined the problem in point from the perspective of the common law regime.

Tort’s Landscape

A sketch of the basic contours of tort law, for those not familiar with it. The chapter defends and starts deepening the traditional case that tort is private law: that what matters in a tort action is simply the claim that one party has wronged another, not making sound social policy or promoting Kaldor-Hicks efficiency or anything like that. It explores settings in which the law does take posthumous interests seriously.