[DanBC]

> You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order.

That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?

[lutusp]

There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage.

http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi...

Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"

[blueskin_]

Legal death is arbitrary as it's just a decision by a trained person. People have been revived after 10 minutes or so after 'drowning' in cold water. Even in cases of heart failure, pronouncement of death is when the doctor/nurse feels further efforts to revive would be futile. In the long past, someone who would today be revived in that case might have been pronounced dead earlier; the issue is that resuscitation efforts are stopped immediately after pronouncement of legal death - if they were not, it would be a more common occurrence.