Forensic Imaginaries: Visualising the Corpse in Law

The UTS Law Health Justice Research Centre welcomes you to a research seminar featuring Dr Marc Trabsky, Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe Law School, who will present on his ARC DECRA project 'Socio-Legal Implications of Virtual Autopsies in Coronial Investigations’. Dr David Carter, UTS Law, will provide a commentary on this innovative area of research.

Overview: Medico-legal investigations into sudden, unnatural, violent and accidental deaths require coroners to ascertain the identity of the deceased, determine the cause of the death and make recommendations for reducing the occurrence of preventable deaths. A key element of their investigation has been the invasive autopsy, which is performed by a forensic pathologist if a coroner deems it necessary to achieve the statutory objectives of coronial law, and which has become in recent decades a site of contestation, especially for families of the deceased who oppose post-mortem dissections due to religious or cultural beliefs. Since the late twentieth century, post-mortem computed tomography (pmCT) has offered the ideal of a virtual autopsy.

Dr Trabsky will discuss the scope of his Australian Research Council DECRA project titled ‘Socio-Legal Implications of Virtual Autopsies in Coronial Investigations’. The project examines how forensic imaging technology impacts coronial investigations in Australia. It focuses on how pmCT has been used since the early twenty-first century to supplement or as a triage for invasive autopsies for the purposes of identifying the deceased and/or determining the medical cause of a death. Little is known about how technological modifications to coronial investigation assist or hinder practitioners in fulfilling their statutory responsibilities under coronial law. The DECRA project will analyse how pmCT has transformed coronial investigations and how it continues to affect the way coroners and other legal personnel working in the jurisdiction understand their roles in the Australian legal system. If the use of pmCT is to be expanded in Australia, and in the future potentially supersede invasive autopsies, then it is critical to these debates that we examine the social and legal effects of the implementation of forensic imaging technology in coronial investigations.

Presenter Biography: Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe Law School, and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow on ‘Socio-Legal Implications of Virtual Autopsies in Coronial Investigations’ (DE220100064). His first book, Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019), was awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2019 and shortlisted for the Council of Australian Law Deans, Australian Legal Research Awards, Book Award in 2020. He is writing a second book, Death: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2023), and co-editing with Imogen Jones the Routledge Handbook of Law and Death (Routledge, 2023).

Commentator: Dr David Carter is a Senior Lecturer and National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney where he also holds an appointment to the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation in the UTS Business School. David's area of expertise encompasses medical and health law, public health law and the criminal law, where his work focuses on the legal, regulatory and governance challenges involved in the delivery of safe, effective and sustainable healthcare services.

A light lunch will be provided.