Posner on Foley (on Blobs)

Eric Posner reviews Elizabeth Price Foley’s The Law of Life and Death (HUP) in The New Republic.

An excerpt:

In eighty years or so, the average American goes from blob to person to blob. The middle phase of this continuum jangles with the bells and whistles of personhood—rights, interests, human dignity, legal protections, the works. The blobs are, at one end, an invisible bunch of cells and, at the other, a mass of putrefying flesh material. The blob-person and person-blob transitions give ethicists, legislators, and judges a great deal of trouble. How does the law keep up as the initial blob advances to human being, and then the human being degrades to blobness?