Tanya Marsh, JD

Tanya D. Marsh is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is a graduate of Indiana University and Harvard Law School. Before joining the faculty at Wake Forest, she practiced commercial real estate and corporate law for 10 years at two large law firms in Indianapolis and as in-house counsel for a public real estate investment trust. 

Tanya’s scholarship focuses on the laws regarding the status, treatment, and disposition of human remains in the United States. She teaches the first-year required course in Property, an upper-level foundational course in Estates and Trusts, and the only course in a U.S. law school on funeral and cemetery law. 

Tanya is a frequent speaker on topics related to funeral & cemetery law.  She has presented at meetings of NFDA, ICCFA, CANA, The New York State Association of Cemeteries, Funeral Consumers Alliance, the National Home Funeral Alliance, and the North American Death Care Regulators Association. Tanya has been quoted in articles appearing in national publications including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, ABC News, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of six books, including The Law of Human Remains (2015) (the first treatise on the subject since 1950) and Cemetery Law: the Common Law of Burying Grounds in the United States (with Daniel Gibson) (2015). 

Tanya is a member of the American Law Institute, an Advisor for the Restatement of Law (Fourth) Property, and an Associate Reporter for the Restatement of Law (Third) Torts: Concluding Provisions on the Right of Sepulcher.