Pro Bono Radio

Posted on February 3, 2011 by | 2 comments

Law and the Multiverse has inspired an episode of Pro Bono Radio, a program of CFRC, the radio station of Queen’s University.  The episode can be downloaded here. Topics covered in the episode include the insanity defense, the duty to rescue, and real world superheroes. We think you’ll particularly enjoy hearing about these issues from a Canadian legal perspective.  Alas, no discussion of the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, but maybe we’ll remedy that in a future post.

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Posted in criminal law, torts

Non-Human Intelligences III: Categories

Posted on February 2, 2011 by | 35 comments

Now, at last, we get to the good stuff. We’ve laid the foundation and talked about existing law, now it’s time to talk about specific types of non-human intelligences and how the law might treat them.

From the main comic book stories, we can identify three main types of non-human intelligences. The first are individuals from animal species who become intelligent for one reason or another. Gorilla Grodd would be a good example here, but there are also Gorr and the New Men. Then there are genuinely alien intelligences, like the Skrull and Shi’ar, i.e. species we’ve never encountered before. Finally, there are machine and non-biological intelligences like Bastion or one incarnation of The Thinker. Unsurprisingly, the law is likely to treat these categories differently.

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35 Comments

Posted in civil rights, constitutional law

Superpowered Merchandising, Part One

Posted on January 31, 2011 by | 21 comments

This is a follow-on from our series on superhero privacy rights.  In this series we’ll be looking at how superheroes (and maybe supervillains) could control the use of their image through copyright and trademarks.  We’ll begin with copyright.

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Posted in copyright, intellectual property

Law and the Multiverse Mailbag V

Posted on January 28, 2011 by | 14 comments

In today’s mailbag we have questions about superhero product endorsements and the Green Lantern Corps.  As always, if you have questions or post suggestions, please send them to james@lawandthemultiverse.com and ryan@lawandthemultiverse.com or leave them in the comments.

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14 Comments

Posted in international law, mailbag, torts

Superhero Spouses

Posted on January 27, 2011 by | 13 comments

This post was inspired by an email from Andy, who wanted to know how the law affects the spouses of superheroes, who may or may not be superheroes themselves.  We’ve previously touched on how the surviving spouse of a deceased superhero could collect life insurance or inheritance without giving away the superhero’s secret identity (short version: wait the prescribed number of years, have the spouse declared dead, and then collect).  But there are other issues affecting married superheroes.  For example, maybe a superhero can’t be compelled to testify as to his or her secret identity, but could the superhero’s spouse?

You may have heard of something called the spousal privilege, spousal immunity, or the marital privilege. Here we’re talking about the marital privilege, which protects confidential communications between spouses.  This is separate from spousal immunity, which allows a person to refuse to testify against his or her spouse in a criminal case.  We’re not quite so interested in spousal immunity because generally superheroes testify against villains; superheroes are rarely criminal defendants themselves (though there are exceptions).

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Posted in evidence, superheroes

Supervillains and Competency

Posted on January 26, 2011 by | 14 comments

Last week we addressed the issue of whether or not supervillains could successfully employ the insanity defense in their criminal prosecutions. The answer we came up with was “It depends, but frequently not.”

This week we’re going to look at the issue of competence, which is a related but different matter. In short, while the insanity defense can turn a verdict from guilty into not, an incompetent defendant can’t go to trial at all, usually resulting in their commitment to a mental facility until such time as they are able to do so.

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14 Comments

Posted in criminal law, criminal procedure, supervillains

Superhero Privacy Rights, Part Four

Posted on January 25, 2011 by | 10 comments

In the first three installments of this series, we discussed the invasion of privacy torts of intrusion, disclosure, and appropriation, as well as the closely related right of publicity.  Here we’ll round out our discussion of privacy with the tort of false light invasion of privacy and the related defamation torts of libel and slander.  In an upcoming related series, we’ll talk about how superheroes can use copyright and trademark law to manage the use of their name and likeness.

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10 Comments

Posted in torts

Superheroes, the Duty to Rescue, and Negligence

Posted on January 24, 2011 by | 33 comments

A reader (hi Dad!) has asked about whether a superhero can be sued for not coming to the rescue. This is actually a good opportunity to talk about a few points of tort law that we haven’t covered yet. These include the concept of a duty to rescue and the standard of care in rescue situations. We’ll also talk a bit about the way the law tends to view issues of causation.

Note that we’re talking in the abstract here; specific states will interpret and apply these doctrines differently.

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33 Comments

Posted in superheroes, torts

Law and the Multiverse Mailbag IV

Posted on January 21, 2011 by | 25 comments

This week we look at sovereign immunity related to escapees from Arkham Asylum, liability for crimes against shapeshifters, and the possibility of non-consensual cloning. As always, if you have questions or post suggestions, please send them to james@lawandthemultiverse.com and ryan@lawandthemultiverse.com or leave them in the comments.

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25 Comments

Posted in criminal law, mailbag, torts

Non-Human Intelligences II: Existing Law

Posted on January 20, 2011 by | 22 comments

Last week we started the conversation about non-human intelligences, mostly by examining the historical reasons why humans have been treated differently by the legal system for pretty much as long as it’s existed. We also looked at some of the philosophical problems involved in coming up with some kind of bright-line rule for deciding what gets counted as a person and what doesn’t.

This time we’re going to look at some of the law that would probably get a workout if a non-human ever sued for the violation of its alleged civil rights (or someone brought suit on its behalf).

Before we start, we’ll again set the parameters of the problem we’re examining. A fictional legislature could, in its wisdom, simply pass a law granting various rights to, e.g, Kryptonians, at least as far as the Constitution would allow. Or a constitutional amendment could be ratified that says Kryptonians count as people for all legal purposes. Thing is, it’s all well and good to pass a law giving a certain species (e.g. Kryptonians) status as persons, but what if the legislature or the constitutional convention wanted to draft a more all-encompassing rule so they wouldn’t have to do it every time we ran across a new intelligent species? Then we’re back to square one. So that’s not the issue here. The issue here is whether there is a judicially workable way to include non-human intelligences in our concept of a person without invoking the political branches, i.e. the executive and the legislature.

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22 Comments

Posted in civil rights, constitutional law