The California Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a willed-body program at the University of California at Irvine that was accused of losing track of a donor’s body, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The court ruled unanimously on Monday that the plaintiff, Evelyn Conroy, had failed to prove that the university had violated its donation agreement with her husband, James Conroy, when his body went missing.

The court found that state law “does not impose a duty” on the university “to conduct its teaching and research in such a way as to safeguard the sensibilities of the surviving family members” when a person wills his or her body. The also found that there was no evidence “that James Conroy’s body was used in a clandestine private tutoring class, transported or dismembered for profit, or used in any manner other than that specified in the donation agreement.”

The University of California system has settled with plaintiffs in numerous lawsuits over alleged abuses in the willed-body programs at its Los Angeles campus and at Irvine. The system announced in January 2005 new safeguards for the management of the programs.

The decision, which ends litigation over Irvine’s willed-body program, is also expected to influence the outcome of several pending lawsuits against the University of California at Los Angeles’s willed-body program.

Ms. Conroy’s lawyer, Paul M. Mahoney, said people considering donating their bodies for science should be careful. “People in this state now know that before they donate their bodies to research, they should get a lawyer and negotiate very clearly the terms of the donation,” he said. —Katherine Mangan