Category Archives: contracts

Superhero Contract Law, Part One

Posted on December 23, 2010 by | 11 comments

Some superheroes like Batman and Iron Man are independently wealthy.  Some, like Wolverine, seem content with a fairly rough and tumble lifestyle.  But what about your everyday, working superheroes, the ones that have to take jobs on the side to make ends meet?  Some, like Spiderman, may work a normal job held by their alter egos.  Sometimes, though, superheroes take jobs that explicitly require the use of their powers.  For example, in one alternate continuity, Colossus worked as a construction worker, a job for which his super strength was no doubt very useful.

But these are comic book superheroes, which we know are prone to losing their powers for a variety of reasons.  What happens if a superpowered individual contracts around his or her powers and then loses them? Or what if Metropolis is attacked by a supervillain and our hero is called away to deal with it? The answer depends on whether the promised work is now impossible to perform.

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Posted in contracts, Superman

Supervillains and Insurance: Who’s Gonna Pay for That?

Posted on December 17, 2010 by | 33 comments

Breaking News! Superman is fighting an unidentified person in downtown Metropolis!

…again.

Didn’t this happen last week? And isn’t this all getting a bit expensive?

Most of the time when property is damaged, the property owner has insurance that will pay to restore their property to approximately the state it was in before the loss occurred. But when Doomsday goes on a rampage of destruction across at least three states or the Joker blows up half of downtown Gotham, insurer’s aren’t actually going to want to pay for that, and there is reason to believe that under the terms of standard insurance contracts, they wouldn’t have to. The reason has to do with the way insurance policies are written, which is a matter of contract as much at it is a matter of law.

So the focus of this post is not whether supervillains can get insurance, but whether standard insurance policies will pay for damage that they cause.

I. Insurance Policies and the DICE Method

First of all, insurance policies are only written for insurable risks. Generally speaking, an insurable risk is one where both the probability and magnitude of a particular kind of loss are measurable, where the occurrence of that loss is truly random, and where it is possible to transfer that risk to an insurer for an economically-feasible premium. A common example of an insurable risk is one’s house burning down. We know how often houses in a particular zip code burn down (this is what actuaries do for a living; some fun, huh?), we know what a particular house is worth, houses don’t burn down at any predictable frequency, and as it turns out, it’s possible to insure against the risk of fire for a premium which is both acceptable to the insured and profitable for the insurer. Flood is an example of an uninsurable risk. Floods do occur at random, and we know basically how often, but the magnitude of losses caused by flood are such that it is impossible to offer flood insurance at any price a homeowner can afford (more on this particular exposure later). Floods are considered “catastrophic” losses, because they cause both a high amount of damage to individual properties but also a high amount of damage to entire regions, making it impossible to adequately spread the cost to other property owners. The same is true of war, terrorism, civil unrest, revolution, etc., which is why all of those are considered uninsurable risks. Discharge of nuclear weapons, intentional or accidental, is also uninsurable. Uninsurable risks are generally excluded from insurance policies.*

When a loss occurs, the claims adjuster is going to walk through the DICE method: Declarations, Insuring agreement, Conditions, Exclusions. First, look to see if there is coverage for this kind of loss on the declarations page, i.e. coverage scheduled for this particular policy. Then, check the insuring agreement to see if the loss results from a covered peril. Then, check to see if there are any relevant conditions in the policy which are applicable. Finally, see if there are any relevant exclusions.

Take the Doomsday example again, and let’s assume that he has just leveled a private residence insured by ABC P&C by throwing Superman through it. ABC’s adjuster is first going to look at the declarations page for the insured’s homeowner’s policy. The house is insured for $100,000. So far so good. Then, he’s going to look at the insuring agreement to see if there is anything of interest there. This policy is a special perils form, which covers everything not specifically excluded, so again, so far so good. Then he’ll check conditions. The homeowner is current on his premium, gave timely notice of the claim, and is cooperating with the adjuster, so again, probably okay there.

But what’s this? Terrorism is excluded? And you didn’t buy the terrorism endorsement? Hmm. That’s going to be a problem.

It’s going to be pretty easy to argue that Doomsday is a terrorist, but even if he isn’t, it isn’t going to be difficult to fit this into either the war or civil unrest exclusions, both of which are part of every insurance policy. Any insurance defense attorney worth his salt would certainly make that argument, and it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t win. Heck, if Superman is a state actor, it might be excluded under the “civil authority” exclusion.

So sorry, Mr. Homeowner, your insurance policy isn’t going to pay for this.

II. Uninsurable Risks and Residual Pools

So what’s to be done? If we’re talking about a universe where superheros and supervillains exist and unstoppable monsters do level significant sections of town every other Tuesday, it seems probable that the legal system and/or insurance industry would take this into account. But because the magnitude of losses caused by superhero battles are so great, it seems likely that the states would have to resort to residual market mechanisms. This is how flood insurance is currently offered on a national level: the FEMA National Flood Insurance Program NFIP is pretty much the only way to buy flood insurance anymore. States have set up residual markets for both high risk drivers and properties with significant windstorm (Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, etc.) and earthquake exposures (California) too. Basically, state legislatures have decided that even though certain kinds of risk are impossible to insure against on the open market, we want people to take those risks anyway, for a host of possible reasons. We want high-risk drivers to be insured both for their protection and for others, and denying someone permission to drive because they cannot buy mandatory insurance seems unjust. People really want to live in earthquake– and hurricane-prone areas, and those people vote, so we’re going to find some way of making that work, no matter how silly it is.

Residual markets can work in one of a number of ways. One is “assigned risk,” an approach frequently used to ensure that high risk drivers have access to at least the state minimum liability limits for personal auto insurance. Basically, every insurer that participates in the market is required to take their fair share of high risk drivers–for a high premium–as a cost of doing business in the state. They can then spread this cost to their other insureds, keeping the companies profitable. But it seems more likely that the states would create their own “Supervillain Pool” similar to the windstorm pools active in Gulf and coastal states. The way these work is that every insurance policy is charged a tax based on the premium which goes into the residual pool. The pool then reimburses property owners for damages caused by supervillain rampages, etc. Property owners would need to buy “Superhero/Supervillain Insurance” from the pool, and that premium would help too, but because this truly is an uninsurable risk, the pool will probably need to be supported by taxpayer revenue. The idea is that all but the biggest losses will be at least mostly absorbed by the pool but that the government will step in if things get really out of hand. The pool can theoretically up its rates in the years following a big loss to ensure that the government gets its money back, but this rarely happens.

Of course, while we’re modifying the law to account for superheros, it would probably also be the case that insurance companies would include some kind of “superhero/supernatural/paranormal” exclusion, shifting that exposure more directly to the residual pool, as has been done with flood, earthquake, and windstorm exposures.

III. Conclusion

A world with recognized and regular supervillain rampages would probably develop a way to insure against that sort of thing, but traditional property insurance would probably exclude such losses. States would need to create residual pools, much like the way they have for earthquake and hurricane losses.

*”Speculative risks,” i.e. risks where there is a possibility of gain and a possibility of loss–investments, basically–are also uninsurable, because the cost of insuring them would more than erase the potential gain from the transaction. These aren’t excluded by insurance policies because they wouldn’t have been covered anyway; insurers simply don’t write policies for those kinds of risks.

Commentary by James Daily:

I agree with my co-author that comic book worlds have likely developed a way to insure against attacks by supervillains and collateral damage from the response by superheroes.  However, even if the cost is evenly distributed among the risk pool, the question of net social cost remains.  In other words, are superpowers a net social good or a net social cost?  I think that, on balance, superpowers are either neutral or slightly positive.

Empirically, it seems that most versions of the DC and Marvel universes are broadly similar to our own in terms of the standard of living and technology level.  If superpowers were a net social cost we would expect one or both to be lower relative to the real world.  Indeed, if anything the technology level is sometimes higher in comic books, although advanced technology is often confined to superhero and supervillain labs.  Whatever the reason (superheroes fighting regular crime, inventions from Batman, Tony Stark, and Reed Richards), superpowers do not seem to be a net social cost.  This fact supports the civil rights claims of superpowered individuals.

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Posted in contracts, insurance

Resurrection Redux: Crimes, Punishment, and Debt

Posted on December 7, 2010 by | 31 comments

Probate law is just one aspect of the law affected by death and resurrection. Criminal law and contract law are also implicated.

I. Resurrection and Criminal Law

The Enron scandal was one of the biggest financial scams in history, before the 2008 crash anyway. While there are certainly interesting issues to be discussed in the execution and ultimate unraveling of that scheme, the real supervillainy shows up right at the very end. Kenneth Lay was convicted of ten counts of conspiracy and fraud on May 25, 2006, but before he had been sentenced, he died. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure, and following well-established law (see, e.g., United States v. Schuster, 778 F.2d 1132, (5th Cir. 1985)), the judge vacated the conviction and the indictment. This meant that his estate got to keep all of the money he “earned” while at Enron, leaving the government and the people he defrauded entirely without remedy.

But what if he was somehow resurrected or reanimated after the judgment was finalized?

This blogger is unaware of any cases where a conviction had been vacated or abated by reason of the defendant’s death before his appeals were exhausted but was then reinstated when the defendant turned out not to have been dead. But given the seriousness with which courts tend to treat criminal convictions, it seems likely that a court would not hesitate to reinstate a conviction for a defendant who somehow stopped being dead.

There’s another potential wrinkle in here: what if someone is convicted for murder and then the victim comes back to life?

Actually, this one is could be pretty straightforward: if the victim was actually dead at some point, i.e. he really was dead, he wasn’t simply missing or presumed dead, then the elements of the crime are still complete. The defendant did, in fact, kill the victim. Whether or not the victim stays dead is not actually an element of any homicide offense. So it would seem that this is ultimately irrelevant, which is perhaps a little counter-intuitive but does have the benefit of simplifying things a lot. As courts tend to like rulings which alleviate the burden on their dockets, this is not an unlikely outcome.

If, on the other hand, the victim turns out to have merely been critically injured and then lost or hidden, as has happened too many times in comic book history to count, things do change somewhat. If the defendant has been sentenced to death, that sentence would probably be commuted, as the Supreme Court is pretty consistent about requiring a dead body before the death penalty can be invoked.  See, e.g., Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 534 (1977). But it is unlikely that the conviction would be overturned entirely. A murder conviction includes all the elements of attempted murder, and a manslaughter conviction would probably include all the elements of aggravated assault. Whether or not a court would order a new trial probably depends on the facts of the crime and the reappearance.

II. Resurrection and contract law

In addition to vacating convictions, death also has an effect on contractual liabilities. If someone incurs a lot of debt and then dies, their creditors can go after the estate but will not actually be able to go after the decedent’s heirs. So what happens when a character dies, his estate is probated, and then comes back? The ins and outs of resurrection and probate have already been discussed, but here it is probably the case that the outcome is going to be pretty dependent upon the facts.

The sneakiest, most villainous hypothetical would be a character that deliberately dies/has himself killed, knowing he will be resurrected or otherwise return to life, in an attempt to avoid his liabilities. Here, there is a good argument to be made that in the courts’ preference for substance over form, a person would not be permitted to deliberately avoid their liabilities this way. Fraud is fraud, regardless of how it is accomplished, and this sort of thumbing your nose at the legal system is likely to piss off the judge. A pissed off judge will probably find some way to nail you, even if it involves creating new law to do it.

But what about the hero who is actually killed and is brought back to life where neither are of his own doing? Clearly there is no intent to defraud, but that doesn’t mean that a court will simply hand out a free pass. Contracts are contracts and debts are debts, and though neither will follow one beyond the grave, coming back from the grave would seem to require leaving its protections behind as well. Here, it seems plausible that a judge would base the treatment of any outstanding debts on the way that the character goes about the rest of his assets. If he wants a clean break and does not attempt to reclaim any of his property that has gone through probate, a court could easily adopt the position that hey, he did die, and as he isn’t trying to “undo” the legal effects of his death beyond the mere fact of his resurrection, allowing the debts to remain discharged makes some sense.

If, on the other hand, the character attempts to return as closely as possible to the legal position he occupied before he died, equity would seem to demand that his creditors be given the opportunity to reassert their claims.  In particular, the equitable doctrine of unjust enrichment would require that, at a minimum, any assets subject to a claim by a creditor could not be reclaimed by the resurrected character without also reviving the debt (no pun intended).

III. Conclusion

So it turns out that these are both examples of how the law might actually be more resilient than it might otherwise appear. Though resurrection does pose interesting issues for judges in both criminal and contract law, it would seem that the legal system already possesses the necessary doctrines and flexibility to handle them.

Commentary from James Daily

I generally agree with my co-author here.  I think there is one interesting edge case, however, and that is the treatment of characters who routinely come back from the dead as a matter of course.  For example, some characters have such powerful regeneration abilities that they will come back from the dead on their own (e.g., Doomsday, Claire Bennet, Lobo).  If someone ‘kills’ such a character only to have them self-resurrect in the expected fashion, has a murder actually been committed?  Note that at the very least attempted murder has been committed as has aggravated battery, so the defendant would still be guilty of a serious crime, but not murder, which would foreclose the death penalty, at least in the US per Coker v. Georgia.

I should probably first explain why attempted murder is still on the table, even if it were factually impossible to permanently kill the victim (e.g. the weapon in question could not actually have killed the victim or the victim would necessarily self-resurrect).  Factual impossibility is generally not a defense to an attempted crime; it suffices that the defendant intended to kill the victim or to cause grievous bodily harm.  It seems likely that any damage sufficient to temporarily kill a self-resurrecting character would fit the bill.

Regarding the primary question: one approach would be to analogize to cases in which the victim was briefly clinically dead but was later resuscitated and then recovered.  Unfortunately, I could only find cases in which the victim was resuscitated but then steadily got worse and ultimately died.  If any knows of a case on point, please let me know.

Instead we can turn to the legal definition of death.  This varies from state to state, but a majority hold that brain death is synonymous with legal death.  In 1975 the American Bar Association stated: “For all legal purposes, a human body with irreversible total cessation of brain function, according to usual and customary standards of medical practice, shall be considered dead.”  61 J. Am. Bar Assoc. 464 (1975).  This is not exactly the definition used in many states, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

In the case of a temporarily dead self-resurrecting character the damage done to the brain is demonstrably reversible.  On the other hand, it may still be irreversible according to the usual and customary standards of medical practice.  A criminal defense attorney would certainly try to argue that a self-resurrecting character cannot be murdered, but I think the courts would be unpersuaded.  The public policy against murder is very strong, perhaps the strongest there is, and the courts would almost certainly adjust their definition of death to encompass the temporary deaths of self-resurrecting characters.

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Posted in contracts, criminal law