When Boston College Law School professor Ray Madoff set out to write a book about the legal rights of the dead in America, she only intended to include one chapter on the law itself, devoting the rest of the book to a philosophical, psychological, sociological and even religious interpretation. But as she began prying into the more remote and cobwebbed corners of the legal system, she stumbled upon a bizarre legal world of grave robbing, posthumous procreation and cryogenic preservation that was too rich a topic; in the end, she devoted the entire book to this world.

Speaking at the Chilmark Community Center about her new book, Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead, Ms. Madoff (pronounced MAD-off) warned of the growing legal rights of this country’s dearly departed, rights that increasingly threaten to crowd out the living through bloated perpetuities and copyrights.

“Giving a lecture on law and death, it’s kind of amazing that I got anyone to come out at all,” she said to a crowd who, given its demographic seemed to have more than an academic interest in the subject at hand.

Ms. Madoff, who fondly recalls square dancing at the Chilmark Community Center in days gone by, admitted that her morbid legal curiosity invites its share of leeriness.

“You might wonder what horrible thing happened to that little square-dancing girl,” she said to the laughter of the audience. “Certainly anyone looking at the bookcase in my house and seeing the titles there — The Denial of Death, The Grim Reader, Corpses, Coffins and Crypts, and my favorite, The Death of Death — might think that the person living there is some peculiar combination of Hannibal Lecter and Woody Allen.”

In researching her new book, Ms. Madoff was continually surprised by the wealth of unusual tales that surrounded the subject. For instance, one of the earliest attempts at establishing a surgical definition of death was that of English physician Jean Jacques Winslow who also harbored more than a theoretical interest in the subject — he had been accidentally buried alive twice.

On the subject of posthumous philanthropy, Ms. Madoff came across the Dickensian parable of Alfred Nobel. When his brother died in a factory accident, a misinformed French newspaper published an obituary for Alfred himself, which he presumably read with unrestrained horror.

“Merchant of Death is Dead,” it proclaimed. “Doctor Alfred Nobel who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before died yesterday.”

“Is it any surprise that shortly after this he set up the Nobel Foundation where his name would forever be associated with the most revered people in history?” Ms. Madoff asked. “It was quite a brilliant act of marketing.”

From there she turned to the more recent phenomenon of the expansion of intellectual property rights to include the identities of dead celebrities or “delebs” and the companies that cash in on their likenesses. One firm in particular, CMG Worldwide, has been featured on 60 Minutes in a piece that Ms. Madoff called a “puff piece.”

“It was practically an advertisement for CMG,” she said. She lamented the fact that the identities of Jack Kerouac and Malcolm X were now controlled by a corporation in Indiana and explained that recent piecemeal legal victories that expanded the so-called right to publicity for “delebs” for up to 70 years after their deaths served only to benefit multinationals like Disney and Time Warner and intellectual property outfits like CMG.

“One of the things I have learned is that although death is universal, the law of the dead is very local,” she said, explaining that a lot can be learned about what a country values by how their law protects the interests of the dead. In France for instance, the control of artwork after both the artist and original buyer has died reverts to the artist’s family, whereas in the United States artwork is forever a piece of property controllable by its most recent owner. In the comparison, Ms. Madoff sees one society that values the personal interests of the artist and one that more highly values property.

When Ted Turner began colorizing classic movies in the 1980s to the consternation of cineastes, Americans had little legal recourse. But when he went to France to show a colorized version of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Huston’s heirs successfully sued him in French court.

Ms. Madoff saved her sharpest criticism for what she sees as a dramatic expansion of property rights of the dead. Whereas the rule against perpetuities used to limit the control of property to the original owner and its heir up to age 18, that law has been repealed and owners can now essentially control property forever.

“Every time we expand these rights of the property for dead people we’re really squeezing out rights of the living, mostly those of the future living — I think this is a mistake we’re making,” she said.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Ms. Madoff argued that we are creating a new kind of aristocracy in America especially, though such estate planning instruments as dynasty trusts which exist forever are unavailable to creditors and are unprecedented in other countries. She also argued for the reinstatement of an estate tax on the top one half of one per cent of earners.

“It strikes me as bizarre that if you get money for working hard or for winning the lottery you pay income taxes in every single category but if you get money because you happen to be the child of a rich person you don’t have to pay any income taxes. I don’t understand how we can justify that,” she said.

She contends that the reason Americans have given so much power to dead people is that as a relatively young country we have not had the burden of living under what she terms “dead man control.” Countries with thousands of years of experience tend to resist being controlled by the dictates of their centuries-long dead, and while the founding fathers understood this strain and enacted legal measures to prevent it, we have been chipping away at them ever since.

The other explanation Ms. Madoff offered for the recent expansion of the rights of the dead is rooted in Americans’ inborn quest for immortality, as painfully demonstrated by the legal battles for control over Ted Williams’s cryogenically frozen body.

“As a people we tend to be quite antideath, it’s not really our thing,” she said. “It’s unAmerican to die.”