Two weeks ago, New York state's highest court ruled that you can't sue an organ donor network for giving away a kidney, even if the donor's family wanted you to have it. The case began several years ago, when a widow named her husband's childhood friend as the recipient of his kidneys. The friend died of renal failure in June, and his family wants to sue the network for donating one of the kidneys to someone else. Who owns a donated organ?
No one, really. American courts have generally refused to treat a corpse as someone's "property," and the same ambiguity extends to the organs. A common-law tradition dating back centuries holds that a dead body cannot be "owned," even by its heirs. That means the heirs can't make a claim on the body's organs, either.
The first recorded judicial pronouncement on the ownership of corpses comes from 1614, when William Haynes of Leicester, England, was accused of having raided four graves in order to steal the property of the deceased—i.e., the sheets in which the corpses were wrapped. Haynes was whipped for petty larceny, but the court ruled that he could not have stolen the sheets from the corpses, because the dead bodies could not have owned them. As dead bodies, they couldn't own anything.
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