Humic lawscapes

Robert Pogue Harrison claims that relations with decaying matters are constitutive of social and cultural forms. He refers to these relations as the humic foundations of the life-world. By extending the concept of humic foundations from cultural studies to the analysis of law, the jurisprudent may re-encounter the decomposing dead as constitutive of law’s forms. This chapter revisits Gilbert v Buzzard and Boyer, a case from 1820 dealing with a citation of burial law. In Gilbert (1820), a court of ecclesiastical law indexed the decomposed corpse to the faltered claim to burial. Once fully decomposed, the grave was no longer occupied, extinguishing any surviving claims to exclusive use of that plot, and reverting the land to the parish. By tracing the influence of decompositions in this case, describing how decomposing materials can be a constitutive form to law, the chapter suggests that the decomposing body evinces a quality – an ‘ontogenetic’ and ‘jurisgenerative’ quality – for which conventional legal discourse and theory cannot account. The constitutive form is in the fluidity of decompositions, which defies containment, stillness, and stable identities, as it leaks, expands, and spreads. Human remains become excrement, as opposed to dignified and ordered, which stages a spacing of ‘non-law’ consequential to the formation 1 of law and legal ideas. Likewise, the absence that follows decomposition is also heteronomous, factoring in the formation of law. The chapter concludes by reflecting on a materialist theory of law as that is specifically applied in the context of the human dead.