The legal status of dead man | Judicial Aid

Ordinarily speaking, the personality of a human being may be said to commence on birth and cease to exist at death and in general the law takes the same view. Dead man is no longer persons in the eye of the law. They have laid down their legal personality with their lives and are now as destitute of legal rights as of liabilities. Although the law does not confer rights upon the dead, it does to some extent recognize and make account of a person?s desires and interests when alive. They are ? (1) a man?s body, (2) his reputation and (3) his estate:

(1)?? According to law, a corpse is the property of no one. It cannot be disposed of by will and no wrongful dealing with it can amount to theft. Again any testamentary directions of a person as to the disposal of his body after his death are destitute of legal effects. Similarly a permanent trust for the maintenance of his tomb is illegal and void. However, the criminal law secures decent burial for all dead man, and the violation or desecration of grave is an offence under the penal code of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as of England. Every person dying in England has a right to Christian burial. ?whether is ground consecrated or unconsecrated, indignities offered to human remains improperly and indecently disinterring them, are the grounds of an indictment? as decided in an English case.

(2)?? The reputation of the dead receives some degree of protection from the criminal law. Under the Bangladesh penal code, it may amount to defamation to impute anything to a deceased person, if the imputation would harm the reputation of that person, if living, and is intended to be hurtful to the feelings of his family or other near relations. According to English law, a libel upon a dead man will be punished as a misdemeanors but only when its publication is in truth an attack upon the interests of living person. The right so attacked and so defended is in reality not that of the dead, but that of his living descendants.

(3)?? By far the most important matter in which the desire of dead men are allowed by the law to regulate the actions of the living is that of testamentary succession. For many years after a man is dead his hand may continue to regulate and determine the disposition and enjoyment of the property which he owned while living.

Source: http://judicialaid.com/the-legal-status-of-dead-man/

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