BODILY REMAINS DONATION CONTRACT FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES IN THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA – DE LEGE FERENDA ANALYSIS OF ITS LEGAL NATURE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63177/isc.2025.05Keywords:
Anatomical gift, Cadaver dissections, Body donation, Contract, Testament.Abstract
Because of rapid development of digital technologies, teaching methods and materials in anatomy courses have evolved notably in latest years. However, cadaver dissection, while countless moral and legal dilemmas about this procedure were never truly resolved, was and still is supreme teaching approach.
If we accept the necessity of using cadavers in education, a particularly controversial issue in this field is the one of adequate legal basis for the valid donation of one's own body for educational purposes. Namely, in the Republic of Serbia, imperative norms stipulate that one’s own body can only be transferred through a testament, for which, by the way, strict form and content are mandated.
We argue that this type of testamentary disposal is unnecessarily limited by form and content, and that a will is, in fact, not an adequate medium for the “anatomical gift”. Therefore, in this paper, relying on analytical and synthetic methods, case studies, and the normative method, we explore the possibility of using contracts as a legal basis. Specifically, the paper presents the results of a theoretical-empirical research of the legal nature and content of contracts for the donating of one's own body for educational purposes, as well as the possibilities and overall necessity of introducing such contracts into future legal texts.
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