Join the ANZ branch of the IAFR for their next webinar “Socio-Legal Implications of Virtual Autopsies in Coronial Investigations” by Dr Marc Trabsky. Dr Marc Trabsky is an Associate Professor in Law and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at La Trobe University. He has published Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019), which was awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2019. His second book, Death: New Trajectories in Law, is in press with Routledge for publication in 2023, and he is co-editing with Associate Professor Imogen Jones the Routledge Handbook of Law and Death for publication in 2024.

In this webinar Dr Marc Trabsky will discuss the scope of his Australian Research Council DECRA project, which examines how forensic imaging technology impacts coronial investigations in Australia. It focuses on how post-mortem computed tomography [CT] has been used to supplement or as a triage for invasive autopsies for the purposes of identifying the deceased and determining the medical cause of a death.

Little is known about how technological modifications to coronial investigations assist or hinder practitioners in fulfilling their legal responsibilities. The project will therefore analyse how forensic imaging technology has transformed coronial investigations since the twentieth century and how it continues to affect the way coroners and other legal personnel working in the jurisdiction understand their roles in the legal system.

If the use of post-mortem CT is to be expanded in Australia, 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.