Wake Forest Law Review 2024 Spring Symposium: The Future of Death Care in America

The Wake Forest Law Review Symposium brings together leaders in the death care industry, academics, and influential reformers to discuss key issues facing death care in America. Panelists will each bring their own distinct perspective, but with the intention to find common ground to help ensure the protection of consumers and expanded consumer choice.

Experts will discuss:

new disposition methods
licensure for funeral directors
the future of abandoned cemeteries
the Funeral Rule

In one full day on Friday, March 1!

Watch the Recordings

Recordings are available for each session of The Future of Death Care in America Symposium held in March 2024. Watch them here.

Read the Articles

The Wake Forest Law Review has published the articles from The Future of Death Care in America Symposium held in March 2024. Together, these articles provide a fantastic overview of some of the most important issues in death care and serve as a primer for anyone who wants to better understand this area. Read the issue here.

Sessions

On Friday, March 1, 2024, the day was filled with panels on some of the topics that matter most today. Details below

Keynote

Overview of current and future trends in death care. Welcoming remarks from Haley Hurst and Professor Tanya Marsh.

Related essay in the Wake Forest Law Review Volume 59 – Number 4 – November 2024: Caitlin Doughty & Kaylee Tillett, Deregulation of Funeral Licensing and Disposition Options in the United States, 59 Wake Forest L. Rev. 851

Caitlin Doughty
Founder, The Order of the Good Death

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, writer, and advocate for funeral industry reform. In 2011 she founded the non-profit The Order of the Good Death, which spawned the death positive movement and is working to legalize human composting and aquamation in all fifty states. Her educational documentaries as “Ask a Mortician” have been viewed over 250 million times and all three of her books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? were New York Times bestsellers. She founded a Los Angeles funeral home, Clarity Funerals, and currently lives in upstate New York.

Panel One: Regulating New Methods of Disposition

Panelists present perspectives and suggestions to improve the legalization and regulation of new methods of disposition.

Moderated by: Professor Philip Olson was born into a three-generations old family of funeral directors. He is now a technology ethicist and Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. His philosophical and ethnographic research has centered on the intersection of STS, death studies, medical and environmental humanities, women's and gender studies, and social epistemology. Phil has served on the Board of Directors of the national Funeral Consumers Alliance, and is Vice President of his local FCA affiliate. He is also a long-time member of the National Home Funeral Alliance. Phil's current research projects examine public death care policies, bioethical and environmental challenges related to the management of dead bodies, and the social distribution of epistemic burdens that are introduced by technologies and technological systems.

Victoria J. Haneman, JD, LLM
Professor of Trusts & Estates, Creighton University

Professor Victoria J. Haneman is the Associate Dean of Research and Innovation and the Frank J. Kellegher Professor of Trusts & Estates at Creighton University School of Law. She teaches courses addressing various aspects trusts and estates, tax law, and business association. Professor Haneman is a regularly engaged expert by media on tax law, the death services industry, and law and pop culture.

Barbara Kemmis
Executive Director, CANA

Barbara Kemmis is the Executive Director of the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). Barbara has over 15 years of experience developing and marketing member benefits, providing leadership in professional associations, fundraising and creating professional development opportunities.

Katrina Spade
Founder & CEO, Recompose

Katrina Spade has been an entrepreneur and designer since 2002. Her background is in project management, finance, and architecture, with a focus on human-centered, ecological solutions. While earning her Masters of Architecture, Katrina invented a system to transform the dead into soil. Since then she invented human composting and has worked tirelessly to bring the process to the world. In 2017, Katrina founded Recompose, a Public Benefit Corporation based in Seattle and the world’s first human composting company. Recompose started accepting bodies for human composting in December 2020.

Abandoned Cemeteries

Overview of a project in North Carolina to map and repair abandoned cemeteries.

Related essay in the Wake Forest Law Review Volume 59 – Number 4 – November 2024: Anyah Barber & Dr. Terry Brock, A Past Forgotten: A Look at Governmental Efforts to Recover and Restore Historic African American Cemeteries, 59 Wake Forest L. Rev. 835

Terry Brock
Manager of Archaeology and Research, Wake Forest Historical Museum

Dr. Terry Brock is the Director of CHARG, and works at Wake Forest University as a Research Associate in both the African American Studies and Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies Departments and as the Manager of Archaeology and Research at the Wake Forest Historical Museum. He is currently the co-chair of the Slavery, Race, and Memory Project at WFU. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2014, and has been working as a public and research archaeologist at nationally recognized museums such as Historic St. Mary’s City and The Montpelier Foundation. His research has focused on the study of the African Diaspora, particularly in the contexts of plantation slavery and post-emancipation in the Mid-Atlantic. He is also an expert on collaborative archaeological heritage and museum work, with an emphasis on community-based archaeology programs, hands-on archaeological learning, and public archaeology. He serves on the board for Archaeology in the Community, a non-profit public archaeology program based in Washington, DC, and MUSEws, a history museum in Winston Salem.

Panel Two: Licensing Funeral Directors

The panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by licensure in death care. At the state level, there is tremendous variance in licensure that creates barriers to entry and establishes standards.

Moderated by: Professor David Harrington discovered an academic gold mine in 1992 when he searched the economics literature for articles on funeral markets and found NO MATCHES. Since then, he has written a dozen academic papers on funeral markets and has testified in half a dozen court cases. His research primarily focuses on the effects of ready-to-embalm laws on funeral-market characteristics, including funeral costs, disposition choices, body donations, funeral directors' gender composition, and the availability of low-cost cremation firms. As an expert witness, he has contributed to legal cases challenging anti-competitive regulations. These regulations barred monks from selling handcrafted caskets, prevented cemeteries from operating mortuaries and selling monuments, and prohibited funeral companies from operating without embalming facilities. Although now retired from Kenyon College, he hopes to teach a short course next fall on the economics of funeral markets at a continuing education center where he now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Renée D. Flaherty
Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice

Renée D. Flaherty is a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, a national nonprofit public-interest law firm that litigates constitutional cases protecting individuals from government abuse. Before joining IJ in 2013, Renée was an attorney at the Washington, D.C., office of Bingham McCutchen, LLP, where she focused on tax controversy matters. She received her law degree from Harvard Law School.

Caressa Hughes
AVP, Government and Industry Relations, Service Corporation International

Caressa Hughes is Assistant Vice President of Government and Industry Relations for Service Corporation International in Houston, Texas. With more than 30 years of experience with a career in government relations, she is responsible for overseeing all the federal and state governmental relations in all states where SCI operates.

Dr. Hari P. Close II
Founder & CEO, Hari P. Close Funeral Services

Dr. Hari P. Close, II, CFSP, COCP organized and established the Hari P. Close Funeral Service, P.A. in Baltimore, Maryland in 1998. Dr. Close was and is determined to provide excellence in funeral service. His personal attention to details during the time of family’s selections for celebration of life. Dr. Close is licensed in five states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, District of Columbia and Virginia).

Panel Three Consumer Protection — The Future of the Funeral Rule

The panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by The Funeral Rule.

Essays in the Wake Forest Law Review Volume 59 – Number 4 – November 2024:
Grace Genereaux & Poul Lemasters, Let It Lie: The Unintended Consequences of Changing the Funeral Rule, 59 Wake Forest L. Rev. 867
and
Sarah Pojanowski & Kate Childs, Transparency in the Funeral Industry: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing?, 59 Wake Forest L. Rev. 981
and
Philip Olson & Lane Wilson, The Affordable (Death) Care Act: Radical Reformation of Federal Funeral Regulation to Address Funeral Poverty, 59 Wake Forest L. Rev. 963

Moderated by: Professor Tanya Marsh primarily teaches Property, Decedents Estates and Trusts, and the only course in a U.S. law school on Funeral and Cemetery Law, and Professional Development. Her scholarship focuses on laws regarding the status, treatment, and disposition of human remains. Marsh is the author of The Law of Human Remains (2015), the first treatise on the subject in more than 50 years, and co-author (with Daniel Gibson) of Cemetery Law: The Common Law of Burying Grounds in the United States (2015). She frequently writes and speaks about issues related to the law of human remains. She also publishes a podcast on the topic called Death, et seq.

Isabel Knight
President, National Home Funeral Alliance

Isabel Knight is the President of the National Home Funeral Alliance, an organization that educates families and communities to care for their own loved ones after death. She is also the CEO of The Death Designer, a company that provides end of life planning services, as well as human-centered design and instructional design for businesses and nonprofits. She also serves on the board of the Funeral Consumers' Alliance of Pennsylvania. Her goal is to create a more humane and equitable end of life experience for all.

Poul Lemasters, Esq.
General Counsel, ICCFA

Poul Lemasters began his career in deathcare more than 20 years ago as a funeral director and embalmer. He quickly recognized that the growing risk and liability in deathcare along with the lack of support and resources for those in this profession made for a deadly combination. So, he decided to go to law school—and he passed! Today, Poul uses his unique background in both deathcare and law to provide resources and counsel to other deathcare professionals.

Sarah Pojanowski
General Counsel, Selected Independent Funeral Homes

Sarah Pojanowski is an expert in all aspects of law related to the death care profession and small business operations, including staff and human resources problems, as well as issues with client families and suppliers. Serving as General Counsel for Selected for over a decade, she also has significant experience in the law pertaining to nonprofit trade associations.

Wrap Up

Final thoughts from Caitlin Doughty and Professor Tanya Marsh.

About Wake Forest Law Review

The Wake Forest Law Review is a student-run organization that publishes five issues annually. The Law Review also sponsors symposia. The Symposium changes topics yearly. Through the publication of articles, notes, comments, and empirical legal studies, the Law Review provides the profession with timely evaluations of current problems in the law and serves students as a valuable educational tool.