Louis J Palmer Jr, Jefferson, North Carolina, US and London, McFarland and Company, 1999, 156 pages, £26.25/$35.

In Organ Transplants from Executed Prisoners, Louis Palmer proposes alleviating the urgent shortage of organs for transplantation by requiring condemned felons to donate their vital organs after execution. The book proceeds as follows.

In his first chapter Palmer reviews the development of the quasi-property rights relating to the bodies of the dead, including the right to dispose of one's own body by means of a will and the right of relatives to bury it. In the second chapter, The Market for Human Body Parts, he goes on to review the current American laws restricting the sale of body parts in order to show that death-sentence removal might be permissible within established principles of law. A C MacDonald has recently provided a good review of the legal restrictions …