Category Archives: constitutional law

Batman: No Man’s Land, Part 5

And now we finally come to the main event in the No Man’s Land arc: the evacuation and quarantine of Gotham City.

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Law and the Multiverse Retcon #2

This is the second post in our Law and the Multiverse Retcons series, in which we discuss changes in the law (or corrections to our analysis) that affect older posts.  Today we’re revisiting one of our earliest posts, Hearsay and Professor X, from way back in December of last year.  Although that post focuses on hearsay issues, this retcon is actually about the Fifth Amendment aspect.  After further research, we think that the original post was incorrect, and that the Fifth Amendment rights to silence and non-self-incrimination would protect against having one’s thoughts read by a psychic.

The Supreme Court has held that “the privilege protects a person only against being incriminated by his own compelled testimonial communications.”  Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 409 (1976) (emphasis added).  So what is a testimonial communication?  The Court explained in a later case that “in order to be testimonial, an accused’s communication must itself, explicitly or implicitly, relate a factual assertion or disclose information.”  Doe v. United States, 487 U.S. 201, 210 (1988).  There are many kinds of evidence that are non-testimonial and may be demanded without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment, including blood, handwriting, and even voice samples. Doe, 487 U.S. at 210.  Perhaps the best example of the distinction between testimonial and non-testimonial communication is that requiring a witness to turn over a key to a lockbox is non-testimonial, while requiring a witness to divulge the combination to a safe is testimonial.  Id.

(This distinction is of vital importance in the era of password-based encryption, and it is not entirely clear whether the Fifth Amendment protects passwords.  One court decided the issue by holding that the defendant need not give up the password but rather only produce the contents of the encrypted drive.  In re Boucher, No. 2:06-mj-91, 2009 WL 424718 (Feb. 19, 2009).  Thus, the protected evidence (the contents of the defendant’s mind) remained secret while the unprotected evidence (the contents of the drive) were discovered.)

We need not wonder whether reading someone’s thoughts counts as testimonial communication, however.  As the Court explained “[t]he expression of the contents of an individual’s mind is testimonial communication for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.”  Doe, 487 U.S. at 210 n. 9.

One might be tempted to argue that the Fifth Amendment shouldn’t apply because the testimony is the psychic’s rather than the witness’s (i.e. the difference between the witness saying “I saw Magneto kill Jean Grey” and the psychic saying “The witness remembers seeing Magneto kill Jean Grey”).  However, the Supreme Court actually addressed this issue in Estelle v. Smith, 451 U.S. 454 (1981).  In that case, a defendant was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation, and the psychiatrist’s expert testimony was offered against the defendant.  The Court held that the expert testimony violated the right against self-incrimination because the expert testimony was based in part on the defendant’s own statements (and omissions).  Thus, using an intermediary expert witness to interpret a witness’s statements will not evade the Fifth Amendment.

So, contrary to our earlier conclusion, we think that psychic powers could likely not be used to produce admissible evidence from a witness who invoked the Fifth Amendment.  And believe it or not, this issue actually has modern resonance.  Although a far cry from the kind of mind-reading that Professor X is capable of, technologies like fMRI may someday see regular use in criminal investigation.  However, scholars and commentators are divided on whether fMRI-like tests fall under the scope of the Fifth Amendment (i.e. is it more like a blood sample or speech?).  See, e.g., Benjamin Holley, It’s All in Your Head: Neurotechnological Lie Detection and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, 28 Dev. Mental Health L. 1 (2009); Matthew Baptiste Holloway, One Image, One Thousand Incriminating Words: Images of Brain Activity and the Privilege Against Self-incrimination, 27 Temp. J. Sci. Tech. & Envtl. L. 141 (2008); Dov Fox, The Right to Silence as Protecting Mental Control, 42 Akron L. Rev. 763 (2009).

Ultimate Comics: X-Men #1, Part 2

This post continues our series on the first issue of Ultimate Comics: X-Men, in which we discussed (spoiler alert!) government tort liability for the creation of mutants through genetic experiments gone awry.  This time around we’ll be talking about civil rights and the limits of government power.

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Castle: “Head Case”

This week’s Castle introduces the issue of cryonics, i.e. the practice of “preserving” human remains in liquid nitrogen under the theory that identity and personality are simply a product of cellular structures. The thinking is that a person who is “dead” by standard definitions may someday be revivable under the right circumstances.  Although this episode didn’t have much to do with superheroes, we got some questions from readers about it. Spoilers inside. Continue reading

Cybernetics, Contracts, and Specific Performance

Brett asks a question inspired by Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the recently-released prequel to the fantastic Deus Ex. The question is whether an employment contract can include a requirement that the employee be enhanced with cybernetic implants should they be necessary to perform the functions of one’s job. This question has implications beyond Deus Ex, such as the classic 1970s show The Six Million Dollar Man, and the RoboCop series, so rather than a mailbag entry, this one’s going to get a proper post of its own.

I. Employment and Employment Contracts

Let’s start with the first question here: what is the nature of the employment relationship? In general, in the US anyway, employment is “at will“. The basic idea here is that there is no contractual relationship between employer and employee beyond the employee’s obligation to do the work required of him or her and the employer to pay the agreed-upon wages for said work. So, for example, while an employer may not retroactively reduce an employee’s salary, there is generally no reason salaries may not be cut or employees fired at the employer’s sole discretion. This most frequently comes up in the wrongful termination context. A lot of people think that there are laws preventing them from getting fired under unfair circumstances. This is usually not the case. Unless the employer is violating a specific statute or constitutional provision, e.g. discriminating on the basis of race, gender, religion, or national origin, employees can, for the most part, be fired for any reason or no reason at all.

But all of that changes where there is an employment contract. Employers tend to avoid entering into employment contracts where at all possible, as this gives them the freedom to rapidly lay off or replace people if they need to. Union workers are the most numerous example of contractual employees, and most of their rights are really found in the provisions of the contracts they secure through collective bargaining rather than any law. But the fact remains that employers and employees can and sometimes do enter into employment contracts, and like in almost all other cases, there is very little limit to what terms can go in there (non-compete agreements are a notable exception). The courts are very, very reluctant to restrict the ability of private parties to structure agreements between themselves.

II. Employment Contracts and Cybernetics

The question then becomes whether employers can include the requirement that an employee receive cybernetic implants as a condition of employment. This will probably depend on the nature of the requirement. The significant feature here is less the kind of implants (though anything which is likely to expose the employee to unreasonable danger is going to be problematic) than the circumstances of the implants.

A. Implants Required Before Employment

On one hand, say there’s an employer that needs someone to do a very specific job, and that job requires the use of cybernetic implants. Right now there aren’t a lot of implants that augment typical human abilities, but the situation gets a lot more plausible if we remove the mind/machine interface part of it. We’ve already got prototypes of electronic tattoos which can monitor vital signs. How long will it be before someone adds GPS functionality or communications hardware? In any case, if the details of the implant are made clear before the employment begins, it seems likely that such a thing would be permissible, given certain restrictions.

First of all, the employer would probably be required to pay for everything related to the implant, even if that wasn’t a provision of the contract. Current workers compensation laws require employers to pay for workplace injuries and diseases regardless of fault, and characterizing the medical care needed to implant, monitor, and remove cybernetics would certainly seem to count, not to mention the expense of treating infections and other complications. Basically, if anything goes remotely wrong with an implant, the employer is going to have to pay for it. This is actually probably a pretty compelling reason implants aren’t likely to be commonly required of employees for quite some time.

Second, employment-related implants are bound to generate a rather frenetic round of litigation about whether having an implant means you are effectively on company time round the clock. The plaintiff bar would certainly like this, as it would expose employers to liability in far more cases than they are now, and this means bigger pockets in more cases. But courts aren’t that dumb, and the likely outcome is that unless the employee is actively engaged in the work of the employer, simply passively carrying an implant does not make one’s activities employment-related any more than carrying a key to the office on one’s key chain.

But that probably means that employers won’t be able to use implants to control the activities of their employees when they’re off the clock. Employers would probably like to be able to do this more than they can now, but they rightly don’t try to most of the time, because the ability to control implies the duty to exercise reasonable care, and employers don’t really want to be liable for the actions of their employees any more than they already are. All that by way of saying that employers that require implants will probably not be able to use the presence of those implants to exert all that much more control over their employees, by contract or otherwise, than they do already with things like cell phones and pagers.

B. Implants Required After Employment

Then there’s a slightly different situation. What if an employer decides that a current employee has to get implanted? This is a bit different, because rather than defining the terms of a relationship before it starts, now we’re changing horses in midstream, as it were.

Whether or not an employer can do this is going to depend very heavily on whether or not the employee has a contract. If they do, the employer isn’t likely to be able to add this as an additional term until it’s time to renew that contract. Terms cannot be added to contracts without the consent of both parties, and additional terms require additional consideration, e.g. additional wages or other benefits. But if there isn’t a contract, the employer might well be able to say that anyone who wants a job tomorrow had better sign up for the procedure. This is, of course, assuming that legislatures don’t enact laws restricting employers’ ability to do just that, and this actually seems like a sensational enough issue to provoke something like that.

C. Implants Implied Before But Installed After Employment

Now we get to the actual situation in the stories mentioned in the intro: an employment contract that does not require implants before employment begins, but permits the employer to add them in at a later date. This gets a little tricky, especially when, as in all of the stories in this list, the employee does not give consent at the time of the surgery. Now we run into a little issue called “specific performance.”  There are generally two possible remedies for a breach of contract: money, and specific performance. Money is just that: money. The injured side calculates the damages they have suffered, and the other side pays, under the terms of the contract. But the court can also order specific performance, i.e. requiring the breaching side to do what the contract said they were supposed to do. For example, if the contract was for the sale of a unique item such as a painting, then the painting would need to be delivered.

The thing is, specific performance is disfavored as a remedy in US jurisdictions. The judiciary has pretty much taken as gospel the idea that it’s more efficient to just pay the money and be done with it than to force two parties who probably don’t like each other all that much to finish whatever transaction they had in mind. So it’s only in rare situations, particularly in real estate contracts or contracts for the sale of one-of-a-kind items, that specific performance will be awarded.

But more to the point, specific performance is unconstitutional in employment contracts. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished “involuntary servitude,” and the Supreme Court interpreted that to include forcing people to perform under the terms of an employment contract in Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207 (1905). So if an employment contract had, as one of its terms, that the employer might require that the employee receive implants at some point down the road, they cannot actually make the employee do it. They can fire an employee that refuses, and they’d be entitled to whatever other remedies are included in the contract, but the courts would not require that the employee submit to implantation.

So the situations where the employee is injured (or killed) and then implanted while unconscious are tricky. First of all, there’s the unrelated issue of whether or not an employer can act to give consent to medical treatment when an employee is unconscious. Forms for this kind of thing already exist, and while it would certainly be highly unusual for an employer to be given this authority, there’s no law that says it couldn’t happen. But consent to life saving surgery is one thing, and consent to life altering surgery is something else entirely. Medical providers might well balk at going ahead with something like bionic enhancement without the express permission of the patient. So the employee would probably need to sign a contract to the effect that he gives the employer permission to authorize the implantation of specific bionic augments before surgery could proceed.

D. Termination of the Employment Relationship

What if an employee who has been implanted decides to quit? Does the employer get the implants back? If this can be done without endangering the life of the employee or seriously injuring them, it’s entirely possible, especially if there was an agreement stipulating that the implants were company property. A court will not force an employee to continue working for an employer if they do not want to, but a court will probably also permit the employer to recover its property in the employee, provided said property can be retrieved without seriously harming the employee, as that would also look a lot like “indentured servitude” as well. “You can quit, but you can’t walk afterwards” isn’t really something a court is going to go for. Of course, given that surgery is pretty expensive, the implants would probably need to be both reusable and fairly expensive for the employer to want to bother. That or highly classified, highly dangerous, or some other factor which would motivate an employer to recover them regardless of cost. But the fact remains that if a particular implant is so integrated into an employee’s body that removing it would kill them or permanently disable them, the employee can probably just quit, and the employer would need to rely on whatever penalties are in the contract, remembering that if the penalties are too severe, a court might decide that they amount to indentured servitude and invalidate them.

III. Conclusion

In short, it’s possible that an employer could make implants a condition of employment, but they’d have to be careful about how that was structured and would really need to ensure that they get the right permissions before hand. But the employee would always have the option to quit, because as a result of the Supreme Court’s Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence, the courts will not force anyone to work for anyone else.

That’s only focusing on the employment and contract implications of cybernetics. The devices themselves are also a fertile ground of inquiry, but we’ll take a look at that another time.

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 5

We generally try to avoid evaluating the merits as such of the works we analyze, trying to stick mostly to the legal side of things and letting readers come to their own conclusions about the works as a whole. But with this latest episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day, we’ve gone from “There are definitely some problems here” territory straight into “None of this makes any damned sense” territory. Still, we soldier on. The show continues to introduce—and usually botch—new legal issues, and we, your tireless writers, give them a look.

Spoilers inside, as always. Continue reading

Cowboys & Aliens

Well it’s no Iron Man, but neither is it The Fantastic Four. It’s a serviceable summer flick, in other words.

It also happens to be (loosely) based on the 2006 graphic novel by Scott Michael Rosenberg, Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley.

Anyway, there are a few legal issues to be discussed here, so take a look inside. Continue reading

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 4

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

True Blood

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.

Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 1

(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