Monthly Archives: August 2013

The Wolverine: Grand Theft Superpower

When I saw The Wolverine I was reminded of this post on “Superpowers as Personal Property,” which considers the idea of treating “stealing” superpowers as theft.  If you’ve seen The Wolverine you probably know where I’m coming from.  If you haven’t, read on but beware: major spoilers follow.

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The Wolverine

The Wolverine is the latest X-Man movie from Fox, the sixth in the series overall. It’s set after the events of X-Men III: The Last Stand, and is in continuity with the earlier (admittedly dreadful) X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Unlike that one, this movie is actually okay. It focuses on Wolverine’s connections with Japan, introducing Mariko Yashida (first appearance, Uncanny X-Men # 118, 1979) and several other characters from the comics, including Yukio and Viper.

In this post we’re going to take a look at one of the legal issues, specifically the issue of inheritance, which is actually pretty key to the plot. But we’ll have to do so with a disclaimer: the movie is set in Japan, and neither of us know much if anything about Japanese law, either in general or particularly about estates and inheritance. So we’re forced to analyze it in the context of American law, and we’ll do so in comparison to prevailing opinions, not any particular state’s law.

There are major spoilers inside. Continue reading

Pacific Rim

If you take legendary anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion and strip out the pseudo-oedipal pop psychology, crushing angst, fan service, crypto-Judeo-Christian imagery, and enormously surrealistic endings, you can get a pretty good idea of what Pacific Rim is like: ten-story mecha beating up gigantic biological monsters. Good times.

For our purposes, there is a legal issue raised by the movie. We’re going to just sort of hand-wave the Jaeger project as a necessary plot device. But the concept of the “Life Wall,” a massive coastal wall combined with a multi-hundred kilometer safe zone around the Pacific coastline does raise an interesting question about eminent domain and Fifth Amendment takings. Continue reading

ABA Annual Meeting Panel Tomorrow

Just a reminder for anyone attending the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco this week: I will be presenting “IP and the Comic Book Superhero” with Brad Desnoyer and Janet Fries tomorrow, Friday, August 9th from 4pm – 5pm at the InterContinental San Francisco.  Complimentary CLE credit is offered with the program.  We hope some of the attorneys and law students in the audience can make it out there!

Batman: Court of Owls

Batman: The Court of Owls is the first few issues of Batman in the New 52. It concerns a shadowy conspiracy referenced in a child’s nursery rhyme apparently common knowledge in Gotham City. The story itself does have a few things to discuss, but this time we’re going to talk about shadowy conspiracies generally. How realistic is it, legally speaking, for a group of people trying to control Gotham City (or the world for that matter) to pull off something like this? Continue reading