[Lyric] Los Angeles County Superior Court (Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles)

In a case concerning the willed body program at defendant university, the Los Angeles County Superior Court, California, denied a motion for class certification by plaintiffs, the relatives of deceased donors who had agreed to give their bodies to the university for teaching purposes and scientific research. The relatives appealed.
The relatives believed that the university did not handle the donors' remains in a dignified manner after medical study and research was concluded, hence they contacted lawyers to help file a lawsuit. The court held that multiple, simultaneous incineration of human remains was not an actionable wrong in the context of a willed body program. The relatives failed to present any admissible evidence of their common core fact that the donors' remains were improperly disposed of at a landfill. In the context of the university's willed body program, the court found, as a matter of law, that it was not improper for the donors' remains to be cremated severally. It would have been unduly burdensome to require the university to label and account for a donor's dissected tissue, organs, sinew and bones, and to ensure that all of the components were retrieved and cremated together, assuming that it was even possible to do so. Health & Saf. Code, § 7054.4, did not require that the incineration of human tissue and remains be conducted individually. The relatives had a long way to go to prove that their emotional distress was based on anything more than a generalized concern that the donors' cremains may have ended up in a public landfill.
The order was affirmed.