Monthly Archives: July 2011

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 4

Posted on July 31, 2011 by | 15 comments

By this point in the series, it’s pretty clear that the writers are deliberately trying to play with the “legal” consequences of the premise. And you know what? Good for them. Of course, it would have been better if they’d asked someone who knew something about the legal system before they went with it, because things aren’t getting any better on that front. Continue reading →

15 Comments

Posted in civil rights, constitutional law, corporations, television

Daredevil

Posted on July 28, 2011 by | 13 comments

As a movie, Daredevil was alright as a movie, but man were there ever some serious legal errors and oddities.  We watched the Director’s Cut, which includes a major subplot left out of the theatrical version.  Like all of our reviews, this one is full of spoilers.

Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in criminal law, criminal procedure, legal ethics, movies

Captain America

Posted on July 25, 2011 by | 17 comments

Captain America was, quality-wise, pretty much the polar opposite of the last movie we reviewed.  There are two legal issues we’d like to touch on, both of which come up early in the movie.  Still, these are technically spoilers.

Continue reading →

17 Comments

Posted in criminal law, movies

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 3

Posted on July 25, 2011 by | 12 comments

The plot thickens! Or it tries to anyway. Turns out radical improbability does not work as a thickening agent unless you’re Douglas Adams, so this plot is still pretty soupy. Because, see, the legal side of things isn’t the only bit that’s getting increasingly implausible. Our heroes’ current theory is that the whole thing is an inside job so that… big pharma can make more money? Really? I mean, we’re completely okay with corporate executives as villains, but corporations absolutely need stability and order to survive—they’re legal fictions, after all—so the suggestion that a corporation would instigate a potentially society-ending cataclysm beggars belief. If this is what Davies has left in terms of plots, it’s a good thing for Doctor Who that he left.

Anyway, on to the law.

Continue reading →

12 Comments

Posted in administrative law, television, torts

True Blood

Posted on July 23, 2011 by | 43 comments

The fourth season of True Blood started up a few weeks ago, so it seems a fitting time to discuss the various legal implications of that setting. The series is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris, but we’re going to focus on the TV show because neither of us have actually read the novels (yet!).  There’s also a comic book series.

For those who don’t know, the premise of True Blood and the novels upon which it is based is that vampires, along with various other supernatural beings like dryads, werewolves, fairies, etc., are real and have been around forever. These vampires are a lot more like the good old bloody vampires we find in Dracula than the sparkly, limp-wristed pretty-boys or hideous, predatory monsters of recent fiction. They’re essentially dead humans animated by magic. They’re immortal, possessed of superhuman abilities—strength, speed, flight, a form of hypnosis—which increase as they age. They’re immune to most diseases and can heal rapidly, but they burn in sunlight and are poisoned and weakened by silver. And their blood acts as a powerful, unpredictable, and highly addictive drug as well as supernatural healing agent when consumed by normal humans. They’ve been living in a sort of shadow society for centuries, always on the borders and dark places of whatever culture they happen to occupy.

The conceit which starts the action of the series is that in the late 1990s, scientists in Japan finally figured out how to synthesize real human blood in the laboratory. Exactly how this is done is not made clear, and thus far isn’t important. What is important is that for the first time, vampires can exist without feeding on the blood of living humans. A faction within the vampire community took the opportunity to make vampires known to the world, ending the masquerade and becoming public members of human society. “Coming out of the coffin,” as it were; the series contain fairly obvious civil rights metaphors, particularly gay rights.

Anyway, as one might imagine, this leads to a right nasty bunch of legal snarls. A lot of these we’ve already talked about in other contexts, which will be helpful, but some of the issues are new. This may well turn into a series of posts, and we may start doing analysis of episodes as they air, as we’re doing with Torchwood: Miracle Day.

I. Immortality

This would be the obvious one. Immortality was one of the first things we discussed, but that was mostly in the context of being immortal while maintaining the masquerade, i.e. not letting anyone know that you’re immortal. So the vampire community would have needed to deal with those issues before the start of the series, but not anymore. Being immortal is not illegal as such. Indeed, making it illegal might well be unconstitutional. In Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962) the Supreme Court that it was unconstitutional to punish someone for being possessed of a certain biological condition, in this case addiction to narcotics. The Court reasoned that while using illegal narcotics might well be illegal, being addicted to them could not be, because that could be involuntary. Similarly, being made into a vampire is frequently an involuntary transaction (and apparently incurable), so punishing people for being vampires would seem to be problematic. Of course, there’s also the whole issue of whether or not vampires count as people, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

This particular implementation of immortality has some weird results. For example, Bill Compton winds up reacquiring the house his family had owned in the 1860s. It had been abandoned when he died, which is plausible given the setting in rural Louisiana, and when he reappeared to claim title, there wasn’t anyone to dispute his claim. We discussed what might have happened if there had been owners in the mean time back in December, and that analysis seems to work here.

II. Vampire Rights

A big question in the series has to do with the issue of vampire rights. By the time the show starts, it seems to be pretty much settled that vampires can own property, but the issue of humans marrying vampires has caused a fair amount of controversy. Truth be told, this seems to be a rather transparent and clumsy attempt to force the situation into an analogy for gay rights, because the issues actually are fairly different. First of all, the reason that people seem to be objecting to human/vampire marriage is that vampires are dead, and thus not really people. Of course, if that’s the case—and they are dead, to be sure—why can they own property? We talked about the issue of non-human intelligences starting here, and the real question here is not why vampires cannot marry, but why they can own property. If vampires are not people, or at best are ex-people, they shouldn’t have any rights at all. But if they are sufficiently human to own property, they should be sufficiently human to do anything else that a human can legally do. So there is indeed a line to be drawn here, but the place that it’s drawn doesn’t really make any sense. The issue doesn’t even really implicate gay marriage, as there are plenty of vampires who would just as soon enter into heterosexual relationships with humans and even with each other, so there’s no inherent change to the traditional definitions of marriage in view. At the beginning of season four we’re finally starting to see what looks like grassroots, community opposition to vampire-owned businesses, but that mostly seems to be based on the immorality or even amorality of vampire stereotypes (and let’s be honest, most of the vampires we’ve seen, even the nice ones, are distinctly unpleasant people) than on the fact that they’re dead and thus arguably not human.

In all fairness though, should vampires of this sort suddenly announce themselves to the world… it’s not implausible that the situation would wind up being just as irrational as the one in the stories. The marriage issue seems forced, but there would likely be a ton of conflicting and inconsistent attempts to challenge their right to become part of society premised on the fact that they’re not really human, or at least sufficiently different from baseline humans to justify treating them differently. But unless the courts pretty consistently sided against vampire rights, it would only seem to take a couple of decisions to establish that their rights are co-extensive with normal humans’.

IV. “Making,” Murder, and the Constitution

There’s one more sort of premise-level issue we’re going to look at before moving on. The question is whether turning someone into a vampire counts as murder. “Dying” is definitely part of the process: the vampire basically needs to drain them dry, have them drink the vampire’s blood, then spend the night with them underground, though exactly how this works hasn’t been shown on screen. And the result is a corpse. Vampires make no bones about the fact that they’re dead: they can’t eat, drink anything but blood, and none of their organs really seem to work. They are, for all intents and purposes, magically animated corpses. But still corpses.

So could a vampire who turns a human into a vampire be charged with murder? That’s going to depend on the means by which the victim was killed. Murder is the deliberate unlawful killing of another. If the vampire hunted the victim down, fed on him, killed him, and then turned him into a vampire, then definitely. But the crime of murder attaches with the deliberate killing, not the conversion. So if, for example, a vampire happened on a car accident, and plucked a person who would have otherwise been DOA from the wreckage and turned them into a vampire, that wouldn’t be murder. It might be assault, as if the person didn’t want to be turned into a vampire it would constitute an unwanted touching, but under the current state of the law, the conversion process alone does not seem to count as a crime in and of itself. Of course, there’s nothing to stop legislatures from passing statutes to make it illegal, and the stories seem to suggest that there would be significant public support for that kind of thing.

Then the question becomes whether that law would be constitutional. Assuming for the moment that vampires have rights like regular people, is it constitutional to pass a law which amounts to forbidding them to procreate? Such would almost certainly be unconstitutional if applied to humans as an impermissible burden on the right to privacy as currently formulated. But the vampires don’t really procreate. They take people that already exist and change them, often against the person’s will. At the very least, it would certainly be constitutional to forbid involuntary conversion. But it would arguably be a burden on the human in the transaction to forbid voluntary conversion. Of course, if vampires don’t have rights, then the whole thing is probably fair game.

III. Conclusion

Those are just some of the baseline legal issues in the premise of the series. We’ll take a look at some specific issues in later posts.

43 Comments

Posted in constitutional law, criminal law, property law, television

Ghost Rider, the Devil, and Bearer Paper

Posted on July 20, 2011 by | 39 comments

The 2007 Ghost Rider movie was neither a particularly good movie nor a particularly good source of legal themes, but there was one interesting observation we seized on.  Spoilers ahead, though I doubt many tears will be shed over spoiling Ghost Rider.

I. The Setup

In the movie, Mephisto (one of many devils in the Marvel universe) has a habit of making Faustian bargains.  When it comes time to collect he sends his henchman, the Ghost Rider, with whom he has also made a pact, albeit one he has to enforce himself, of course.  The precise terms of these contracts vary but the practical upshot is always the same: the devil gets your soul, from which he can derive power.  The movie is centered around the fate of a particularly valuable contract for the souls of an entire town, one thousand in all, which Ghost Rider’s predecessor had hidden rather than give up to Mephisto.

So far this is fairly standard stuff.  The twist comes from the fact that there are warring factions with Marvel’s demonic community, and Mephisto’s son Blackheart wants the contract for himself.  In fact, he manages not only to get the contract but to collect the souls bound by it.  And this brings us to the interesting part.  If the contract was with Mephisto, how could just any demon who got ahold of it cash in on the deal?  The inescapable conclusion is that demonic contracts must be redeemable by the bearer.

II. Bearer Paper

For an attorney, the idea that jumps readily to mind is “bearer paper.”  Bearer paper is a kind of negotiable instrument, which you are probably familiar with in the form of checks and money orders.  You’re probably also familiar with bearer paper: you create it any time you make a check out to “cash,” for example.  As the name suggests, bearer paper is payable to the person bearing (i.e. physically holding) the bill, note, check, etc.  This is convenient, but also dangerous, since it becomes much easier for a thief (or an upstart young demon) to cash it.

So could Mephisto’s contract have been bearer paper under US law?  The first thing to consider is whether the contract could have been a negotiable instrument at all.  As defined in the Uniform Commercial Code, Article 3 (which has been adopted by most states):

“negotiable instrument” means an unconditional promise or order to pay a fixed amount of money, with or without interest or other charges described in the promise or order, if it:
(1) is payable to bearer or to order at the time it is issued or first comes into possession of a holder;
(2) is payable on demand or at a definite time; and
(3) does not state any other undertaking or instruction by the person promising or ordering payment to do any act in addition to the payment of money, but the promise or order may contain (i) an undertaking or power to give, maintain, or protect collateral to secure payment, (ii) an authorization or power to the holder to confess judgment or realize on or dispose of collateral, or (iii) a waiver of the benefit of any law intended for the advantage or protection of an obligor.

That’s a lot of text, but the basic rule is that a negotiable instrument needs 1) a fixed amount of money, possibly with interest; 2) a payee (i.e. the person getting paid, which can be the bearer); 3) a payable date, which can be “on demand” (i.e. whenever the payee wants) or a specific date; and 4) it generally can’t have any other conditions attached to it (e.g. no fair saying “Pay to the order of Bob if he paints my house.”).

And there’s the rub.  Mephisto’s contract is for souls, not money, and it plainly has some additional conditions on it (e.g. whatever it was Mephisto did for the people of San Venganza in exchange for their souls).  Of course, this is according to modern US law.  The contract was drawn up in the 19th Century.  Can we do better under the law of the time?

III. The Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law of 1896

The Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law was the predecessor to the Uniform Commercial Code, and like the UCC it was broadly adopted.  The UNIL or something like it was probably the law of the land at the time the contract was formed.  As luck would have it, its definition of a negotiable instrument is a bit looser than the UCC’s:

An instrument to be negotiable must conform to the following requirements:
1. It must be in writing and signed by the maker or drawer.
2. Must contain an unconditional promise or order to pay a sum certain in money.
3. Must be payable on demand, or at a fixed or determinable future time.
4. Must be payable to order or to bearer.
5. Where the instrument is addressed to a drawee he must be named or otherwise indicated therein with reasonable certainty.

This gets us closer.  The UNIL allows a negotiable instrument to be made for a promise rather than only money.  But that promise has to be unconditional, which means it can’t be something like “I promise to give the bearer of this contract my soul if Mephisto grants me three wishes.”  That pretty well spells the end of the bearer paper idea.  Presumably the infernal legal system is more flexible in this regard, although one wonders why Mephisto would be so foolish as to draw up such a contract in the first place.  Somebody ought to get that guy a lawyer.  One presumes he has ready access to plenty of them.

IV. Sidenote: The 13th Amendment

The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude.  However, it’s questionable whether Mephisto’s contract could be voided on that basis, since the damned are dead and have no rights.  Further, US courts have been reluctant to exert jurisdiction over the Devil.  See United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D.Pa. 1971).  Anyone considering entering into a pact with the Devil should definitely bear in mind that it may be difficult to obtain relief in court should the Devil prove less than trustworthy.

39 Comments

Posted in contracts, movies

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 2

Posted on July 18, 2011 by | 23 comments

There was a lot less legal content in this episode, but there are still a few things worth talking about. The biggest is probably whether it’s even remotely plausible to cook up an arsenic-related chelation therapy with chemicals available on your standard commercial airliner. The answer is “We haven’t the foggiest.” We’re lawyers, not chemists. But if the show treats chemistry the way it’s treated the law so far, we’re doubtful.  More serious spoilers follow. Continue reading →

23 Comments

Posted in criminal law, television, torts

She-Hulk Gets Disbarred

Posted on July 15, 2011 by | 16 comments

In the most recent She-Hulk run, we find in She-Hulk # 22 that Walters has been disbarred. We don’t find out why until # 29.

Let’s take a look at what happened. There’s spoilers here for those who care.

I. The Run Up

We learn about what went down in bits an pieces, but most of the story comes out in # 29 in the form of what amounts to a flashback. Why David et al chose to tell the story this way I’ll never know, but whatever. Walters was representing Arthur Moore, aka “Dark Art,” a one-off villain who hasn’t made any other appearances as far a I can tell. The guy had been accused of robbery and had come to Walters’ firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzman, and Book (Holliway having stepped down), for defense. Unlike most other villains, Moore actually sort of picked on Walters fairly consistently for representing a villain, which was kind of weird. In any case, Walters manages to get his case dismissed because all of the evidence the prosecution had was acquired in an illegal search on a pretextual traffic stop. Evidence acquired in violation of the Fourth Amendment being inadmissible, the judge threw out the indictment. If we give the writers a pass for doing this in open court instead of with motions in limine, we’re doing okay so far.

Moore’s personal effects are then returned by the police, and Moore takes possession of them back in the firm’s offices. One of these things is some kind of mystical gem. Moore then asks whether he’s still protected by attorney-client privilege, and when Book tells him that he is, Moore uses the gem to telepathically transmit images of him doing a bunch of bad stuff to kids. She-Hulk goes berserk, punches him through a few walls, and after confronting him in the street, basically tells the entire crowd what Moore has done. On the next page, we find that she’s been disbarred and is leaving the firm.

II. Attorney-Client Privilege The Duty of Confidentiality

Attorney-client privilege is one of the most important features of legal ethics, and ethical issues aside, skilled litigation attorneys are going to be constantly on the lookout for discovery requests and lines of questioning that run up against it.  The foundation of the privilege is an attorney’s duty to keep a client’s confidences.  Unsurprisingly, blabbing a client’s guilt in public is nearly always a violation of that duty of confidentiality.

However, the rule is not absolute, and there are certain contexts where an attorney may reveal information delivered in confidence. One of them may actually apply here, namely N.Y. Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6(b)(1) and (2), which permit an attorney to reveal confidential information to prevent “reasonably certain death or bodily harm” and to prevent the client from committing a crime, respectively. If a client credibly says that he is going to hurt or kill someone, an attorney is not prevented from calling the cops. Depending on how one reads Moore’s revelations, it’s possible that he could have been communicating that there were still kids in danger. In which case he was basically declaring open-season on himself, at least insofar as those particular kids were concerned.

Still, that point is debatable, and if there weren’t any kids in trouble, Walters will be. The book also mentions that it’s inadvisable to attack a client. This is true.  Not only is it illegal, it’s likely an ethical breach as well, since the crime in question “adversely reflects  on the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer” in violation of Rule N.Y. Rule 8.4(b).  After all, would you trust a lawyer who punched her last client through a wall?

III. Scope of Representation

Moore hired the firm to represent him in his robbery case. The information he revealed had to do with entirely different crimes that were not the subject of that representation.  Could Walters’ argue that she owed no duty of confidentiality because the information he revealed was beyond the scope of her representation?

Unfortunately for Walters, almost certainly not. First, scope of representation can only really be limited ahead of time and with the informed consent of the client. N.Y. Rule 1.2(c). Second, just before Moore did his thing, Book specifically affirmed that he was still protected by attorney-client privilege.  As N.Y. Rule 1.6(a) says, confidential information specifically includes information that is:

(a) protected by the attorney-client privilege, (b) likely to be embarrassing or detrimental to the client if disclosed, or (c) information that the client has requested be kept confidential.

The fact that Moore was using that to goad She-Hulk into doing something stupid is probably not going to matter: being a fiduciary means putting the interests of the client ahead of one’s own.  And being a criminal defense attorney means that sometimes you have to keep terrible secrets.

IV. Getting Disbarred

The question then becomes whether all of this was enough to get She-Hulk disbarred. That’s debatable. Disbarment is the most serious punishment in the legal ethics context. It means losing one’s ability to practice law, probably permanently, and getting disbarred in one state can serve as grounds for getting disbarred in the rest. Because it is so serious, disciplinary commissions—usually arms of state supreme courts—tend to impose lesser penalties like reprimands and temporary suspensions before they disbar someone.

Here, disbarment seems perhaps a bit much. Walters had not been up on any ethical charges to this point—as far as we know—and her breach does not actually seem to have put Moore in any legal danger. We don’t hear anything about Moore being prosecuted or otherwise getting in additional legal trouble. It seems plausible that the New York Departmental Disciplinary Committee would go for a lesser punishment. Still, it’s not impossible that disbarment could have resulted, as there is usually some discretion there, and publicly violating the duty of confidentiality is pretty serious.

Of note: in New York an attorney is automatically disbarred if he or she is convicted of a felony.  N.Y. Judiciary Law § 90(4).  If Walters plead guilty to a minor felony charge in regard to the incident (e.g. second degree assault), that would be sufficient to result in her disbarment.  If she stayed out of trouble for seven years she could apply for reinstatement.  N.Y. Judiciary Law § 90(5)(b).

V. The Set Up

Except for the fact that the whole thing was a set up. There were no kids in danger. Moore did what he did deliberately, at the behest of someone trying to destroy She-Hulk, personally and professionally. We find out that he had abducted the kids, but that they were all being kept in a cabin upstate, well cared for. He returned them once Walters’ disbarment was finalized. The DDC is not likely to look very kindly on this kind of sting job, and may well have been amenable to reversing itself should Walters have cared to make a motion. Turns out she didn’t, as she was pretty disillusioned by the whole affair, but it seems likely that Walters could have gotten her license back without the massive public relations stunt she pulls a few issues later.

VI. Conclusion

So basically, this story works. Breaching the duty of confidentiality is a violation of legal ethics, and can serve as grounds for getting disbarred. It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the DDC would have disbarred Walters at this point, but one can argue that her status as She-Hulk makes her situation delicate enough that they may have gone straight for disbarment. And the fact that the whole thing was a set up may mean that she could have gotten her license back, but the story is pretty clear that she didn’t want to, so that’s more or less moot.

As the She-Hulk stories from # 22 on don’t involve Walters practicing law, there’s a lot less here than there is in the earlier stories. There’s probably another post or two to be had, but we’re reaching the end of the material here, at least with regard to legal ethics.

16 Comments

Posted in legal ethics

Manhunter, Volume 4, Part 3

Posted on July 14, 2011 by | 5 comments

We’ve made it to the last part of our series on Manhunter volume 4. This is also the penultimate entry in our larger series on Manhunter, since volume 5 is pretty light on legal issues. To celebrate wrapping up this series, we’re giving away a complete set of volumes 1-5 of the Marc Andreyko run of Manhunter. To enter, simply send an email with “Law and the Multiverse Manhunter Giveaway” in the subject to james@lawandthemultiverse.com.  Please note that you must be 13 or older to enter.  We’ll choose a winner at random from among all of the entries we receive and announce it with the final Manhunter post.  (In the future we’ll probably give away books before we start writing about them, but we only had the idea for this recently.)

Now on to today’s post.  The remaining issues to talk about in volume 4 are some evidentiary problems and the “elephant in the room” jurisdictional issue.  Spoilers ahead!

I. Evidence, Grand Jury Procedure, and More Legal Ethics

After Spencer obtains Superman’s agreement to testify and to allow the use of the videotape proving that Superman was acting under Lord’s psychic control, she arranges a meeting at the judge’s home with the judge, the prosecutor, Superman, and herself.  There she shows the judge and prosecutor the videotape.  As we’ve discussed, there would ordinarily be no judge involved at the grand jury stage of things.  Curiously, the comic gets several things right at this point that almost make up for things it got egregiously wrong earlier.

First, the judge correctly remarks that she can’t speak to Spencer without the prosecutor present.  California Rule of Professional Conduct 5-300(B) states that attorneys cannot communicate with a judge regarding the merits of a case except

(1) In open court; or
(2) With the consent of all other counsel in such matter; or
(3) In the presence of all other counsel in such matter; or
(4) In writing with a copy thereof furnished to such other counsel; or
(5) In ex parte matters.

So Spencer was right (so far as it goes) to call the prosecutor into the meeting.

Second, the comic correctly shows that both the judge and the prosecutor are not at court while the grand jury is deliberating.  As mentioned in the last post in this series, no one except the jurors and any necessary interpreters may be present for federal grand jury deliberations.

Third, the judge correctly tells Spencer that the evidence can only be offered at trial.  The prosecutor can choose what evidence to present to the grand jury, and once the grand jury has begun deliberating it is too late for the prosecutor to offer any new evidence.  Of course, it’s highly unlikely that the prosecutor would show such evidence to the grand jury anyway.  Although prosecutors may have an ethical duty to give the defendant any evidence tending to prove the defendant’s innocence (ABA Model Rule 3.8(d)), it’s up the defendant to actually use that evidence.  The prosecutor has no obligation to do the defense’s job for it.

Although the comic gets a lot correct there, there’s still a significant error here.  Specifically, a judge would look at the video or listen to what Superman had to say outside of the proper context (i.e. a trial or at least a pre-trial hearing).  For one thing, Superman wasn’t under oath, and for another the prosecutor wasn’t given an appropriate opportunity to contest the admissibility of the video (he made a lame show of opposition but the judge told him to shut up).  So we’ll have to give this part a mixed review: kudos for getting some of the ethical and procedural issues right but minus points for trying to present evidence outside of court.

II. Jurisdiction

We saved this issue for last because it actually makes almost everything else in this case moot: the United States has no jurisdiction over Maxwell Lord’s murder because Wonder Woman killed Lord at Checkmate’s headquarters in Switzerland, which is outside both the US’s territorial boundaries and the federal government’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction.  The fact that Lord is a US citizen doesn’t change the result.

Of course, Wonder Woman could have been charged and tried in Switzerland.   It’s not entirely clear where Checkmate headquarters is located within Switzerland, so we’re not sure which canton’s laws would apply.  In some cantons, Spencer could represent Wonder Woman but it would require the permission of the local authorities and the assistance of a local attorney.  See, e.g., Article 23 of the Geneva Loi sur la profession d’avocat.  In cantons that allow non-lawyers to represent people in court she could certainly represent her.  See, e.g., §§ 2-3 of the Basel Advokaturgesetz.  But in other cantons there doesn’t seem to be any provision for a foreign, non-EU attorney to represent a client in court.  See, e.g., the Bern Kantonales Anwaltsgesetz.

However, even if she could represent Wonder Woman we don’t think it would be a good idea.  Spencer doesn’t appear to speak any of Switzerland’s official languages, and she presumably knows little or nothing about Swiss law, which is a civil law system and thus fundamentally different from US law.  Even if Wonder Woman requested her services, Spencer would have to consider whether she could competently represent Wonder Woman as required by the California Rules of Professional Conduct.  Those rules still apply even if Spencer is outside of the country.  Rule 1-100(D)(1).

Since we know about as much about Swiss law as Spencer, we will not speculate as to what the result might have been had Wonder Woman been tried in Switzerland.  If there are any Swiss lawyers in the audience we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

That’s all for this issue.  Be sure to enter the drawing!

5 Comments

Posted in criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, legal ethics

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 1

Posted on July 11, 2011 by | 35 comments

(Update: we have discovered  a case on point for one of the issues raised in the post.  Check out section II of the post for more.)

Torchwood: Miracle Day is the fourth “season” of the British sci-fi series Torchwood, itself a 2006 spin-off of the ever-popular Doctor Who revival. The basic premise is that, all of a sudden, people stop dying. This is not as much fun as it sounds.

Interestingly enough for the purposes of Law and the Multiverse, the series so far has more than its fair share of legal issues. So we’re going to take a look at each episode as it comes out. We’ll leave reviews of the episodes for others, as always, but hope to be your source for legal analysis for the series. Spoilers will follow. You have been warned. Continue reading →

35 Comments

Posted in civil rights, constitutional law, international law