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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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