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Fantastic Legal Weirdness
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In a world where Death is Cheap and magic can alter reality, legal proceedings can be knocked for a loop. A necromancer, instead of raising a Cavalry of the Dead, might find legitimate work as a consultant dealing with probate cases or solving murders. Maybe the Jedi Mind Trick or magical illusions can be used for Jury and Witness Tampering. Can The Nth Doctor be held liable for crimes committed by their previous incarnations? Do the police need a search warrant to use telepathy? Does resurrection invalidate a conviction and death sentence, and do resurrectees have the right to reclaim property inherited or salvaged from them? And if your marriage is considered dissolved when you die, but you're brought back to life, are you still married to your spouse, or do you have to do the wedding and the paperwork all over again? How do age-of-consent laws (and other laws meant to protect minors) work if you're Really 700 Years Old? Are space colonies really colonies (and if so, do they belong to nations or to Earth in general?), or are they (or could they be) sovereign nations unto themselves? Supertrope to: Inhumanable Alien Rights, where the civil rights of nonhuman characters, as opposed to humans, are in question. Revival Loophole and Legally Dead, where being declared dead when you actually weren't, or being resurrected, causes legal trouble. Make the Dog Testify, where a talking (or otherwise sapient) animal's testimony is crucial to the case. Sister Trope to Fantastic Religious Weirdness, where religions and religious practices interact oddly with Speculative Fiction elements. Compare No Adequate Punishment where a case is so novel that no one has had the forethought of what justice would look like. See also Undead Tax Exemption, where such problems are handwaved away, and Loony Laws, where the law makes no sense even in the setting. |
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In Claw & Warder, the supernaturals are governed by their own laws, collectively known as the Canon and Covenants. One of those covenants permits them to act in accordance with their nature, even if it involves harming mundanes (so a licensed vampire is permitted to drain humans in order to feed). The existence of multiple realms also means that there are certain legalities involved in interactions between them. For example, many of those realms, including Gehenna and Niflheim, have royalty. Members of royalty have certain privileges, such as refusing summons to court. Since the series is a police procedural in the vein of Law & Order, the legalities come up a lot. | |
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Watchmen: In the backstory, vigilantism was legalized at some point to make costumed heroes (none of whom had actual superpowers until Dr. Manhattan) legal crime-fighters. However, in The '70s a major police strike and nationwide protests led to the passage of the Keene Act, which repealed their legalization. | |
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The War of the Masters: In A Good Compromise, Jolin Tabris, a Trill lawyer, is fighting a probate case against a joined Trill whose previous host illegally bequeathed half his estate to his next host. Tyria Sark suggests the symbiont is trying to take the case constitutional, and Jolin says he might cite legal precedent to get the will thrown out, namely the case from the last time the same symbiont tried this stunt. The prologue of Don't Say Goodbye, Farewell establishes in passing that you need either the subject's consent or a warrant to use telepathic examination in a criminal investigation: in this case, of an officer whose home planet recently defected from the Federation to the Klingon Empire. Commander Janice Qua refuses and demands an attorney. Create Your Own Fate has a couple of Courtroom Episodes taking place in Bajoran courts. In the first case, the Bajoran justice system seems more willing than a real-life court to accept an Insanity Defense, probably because of the Occupation leaving a lot of Shellshocked Veterans behind: once a PTSD break is proven, Sheri Walford has her charges reduced from assault and battery and assault on a law enforcement officer, down to misdemeanor assault,note not that a real-life court would necessarily be averse to showing lenience in a case like this; this is Truth in Television reputedly going back to Julius Caesar and is sentenced to community service and mandatory psychiatric counseling. In the second case, Kanril Eleya has her telepathic examiner replace the original witness on the stand after the examination proves the witness was perjuring herself. Myrmidons again references the rule about needing a warrant for telepathic examination: after a rape accusation between a Starfleet officer and a Moabite enlisted Marine, Kanril Eleya mentions that the victim's statement will probably be ruled inadmissible because of differences between Starfleet and Moabite military law (the Moabites obtained the statement by using a telepath and a Truth Serum on the victim without a warrant), but also notes that this just means they have to find other evidence. Sheri Walford sidesteps it by finding circumstantial evidence linking the defendant to a cold case, which Starfleet Security confirms. The defendant then pleads guilty to both crimes and is sentenced to a minimum ten years of psychiatric rehab. |
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In the ending of Zero Time Dilemma, one of the reasons the Big Bad gets away with everything is that he didn't do anything very bad in the current timeline, although his plan centered around torturing espers in other timelines and gathering the related data for use in that one. The protagonists can't prove anything unless they're willing to break The Masquerade, and that would cause a whole new legal fallout. | |
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Heralds of Valdemar: Brightly Burning: A teenager's Traumatic Superpower Awakening (which killed several bullies torturing him at the time) throws the royal court into chaos for this reason. Eventually legal authorities conclude that he's not guilty, based on the principles that a) you can't expect someone who doesn't even know they have magic to control it, b) the boy was restrained and had no means of escape, and c) the surviving bullies have testified under Truth Spell that they intended to hurt him. It's earlier noted that because Valdemar was built around the (entirely true) premise that Heralds have Incorruptible Pure Pureness, its current legal system can't undermine that premise even if given reason to. | |
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Given that Grimm combines a fantasy show with a police procedural, this happens every once in a while. For example, one episode has a trio of supernatural creatures (or "Wesen" as the show calls them) rob a series of banks while in Game Face. It's implied that they can't be indicted since it can't be proven it was them and their "masks" can't be found. A Vigilante Execution renders those issues moot. | |
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Discussed on Haven in the episode "The Trial of Audrey Parker." Audrey, an FBI agent, has been investigating cases in Haven after requesting she continue on there following the closure of the case she was originally working on. When her boss shows up in town to confront her about the lack of reports she's been filing and the fact that pretty much every perp has been Let Off by the Detective, she tries to explain that she can't arrest them because their actions are outside the legal system. | |
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The Talmud: Ultimately, every debate goes back to "what did God say about this?," but some issues get stranger. For example, Yevamot 122a, in discussing when a man can be considered Legally Dead, brings up a case where the death was announced by an Ambiguously Human figure who disappears, and another where the man himself told people he was dying through something like Astral Projection. | |
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Log Horizon: The Round Table Conference try to set up a legal code for the people now trapped in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse. It's mentioned, for instance, that since Adventurers will respawn with no permanent harm done when killed, murdering an Adventurer is a far less serious crime than in their original world, on about the same level as assault and battery. Theft of property and enslavement are considered the more serious crimes in comparison. | |
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My Hero Playthrough has the Napier Doctrine, a UN resolution to allow member nations to pass laws allowing for trial in absentia, if the criminal's Quirk makes it dangerous to try them in person or remotely. It was named and created for this story's version of The Joker, whose Quirk caused anyone who saw his face or heard his voice to become a laughing, murderous criminal for thirteen hours, even if they saw or heard a recording. The Doctrine does specify that such trials must still be fair, for example Japan's law under the doctrine says that the trial must be approved by the country's Supreme Court and states that if it is defended by a Public Defender, there must be at least two of them, one of senior rank, and they are offered bonuses for winning. This is used to try Overhaul, since removing him from his extradimensional cell would be too dangerous. | |
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The series Century City was completely structured around the legal struggles of various people 20 Minutes into the Future, anything from the legality of cloning a child (the original was long dead, and it was well-accepted that it would only biologically be the same) to a baseball pitcher that got a cybernetic eye to replace one lost in an accident being kicked out of his team (because of the belief that the eye was an unfair advantage) and in an unproduced episode a scientist taking Cure Your Gays to the most literal extreme (having created a procedure that could be applied to unborn children that would reduce the possibilities of them becoming gay when they aged, and essentially dooming all minority sexualities to extinction if it became widespread). | |
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My Hero Academia: Vigilantes: It's mentioned that it's actually illegal to use a Quirk in public under any circumstances unless you have a Hero License. That being said, while in theory it's extremely restrictive, in practice it's only brought up in the worst cases. No one cares that Koichi uses his Quirk to slide around the ground all the time; one hard-line cop gives him a bit of a talking-to, but that's the worst of it. It's only when Quirks cause a disruption that the police get involved. Likewise, the pro heroes repeatedly let obvious cases of self-defense slide. | |
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Wearing the Cape: Common, due to the way the 'verse acts as a Reconstruction for most superhero tropes. People with powers need to be certified in order to use them to fight crime. Period. Anything else is vigilantism, and is not tolerated. However, the primary purpose of certified super teams is actually disaster relief. A good amount of space is spent describing the legal processes which allow heroes to cross state borders (and even national borders in the really big emergencies) to get to disaster zones as fast as possible and hold things together until the slower but more numerous mundane crisis aid arrives. Because of this, superheroes have military ranks (albeit as civilian militia) to help smooth out some of the problems that would otherwise arise. One oft-repeated piece of advice is that superheroes are not police. They are civilian contractors who aid the police when they can; whenever they take down a supervillain, it's a citizen's arrest. While secret identities are rare due to the reality of living in a world with the internet, supers who do have secret identities are required to disclose them to the government. Otherwise, they can't get certified, they can't testify in court, and overall they're treated the same as any other random weirdo who shows up with a mask and refuses to explain who they are. On the other hand, deliberately outing a super is a huge breach of privacy, and the person doing it will be sued into oblivion. While supers under the age of eighteen can be certified and work on hero teams, they cannot be knowingly sent into a situation where they are expected to see combat. The early books focus on a few laws and potential laws on superhuman abilities. While the biggest one (creating a public database of all superhumans and their residences) doesn't go through, it seems as though anyone with a dangerous power—even basic Super-Strength—is legally considered armed at all times. A super construction worker gets drunk and rowdy in the first book, and it's mentioned that he can be charged with using a deadly weapon while intoxicated. |
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In The Dispatcher and its sequel Murder by Other Means, the fact that 99.9% of murder victims (and only murder victims) come back to life had a big impact on the legal system. There's now a special profession called Dispatchers, whose sole job is to kill those who are about to die of either natural causes or no-fault accidents. Insurance companies now demand that a Dispatcher be present during any high-risk surgery in order to kill any dying patient. This has also resulted in criminals try to come up new ways of killing people, such as tying them up and leaving them somewhere to die of starvation or exposure. Sure, they'd come back since it counts as murder, but they'd still be suffering from the same problems and likely die of natural causes shortly after. | |
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The Eberron sourcebook Sharn: City of Towers has a Law and Order chapter which specifies among other things that the use of various forms of mind control magic is considered a form of fraud, witness stands are commonly placed upon diases enchanted to make it harder for a witness to knowingly lie (and witnesses are required to relieve themselves of any items that may help them resist such magic before taking the stand), and Bestow Curse is among the range of punishments in use against repeat offenders. | |
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Harry Potter: The Ministry of Magic has laws about Dark curses, ownership of magical animals, the rights to carry a wand, etc. Two of the main laws in the story are that a.) underage wizards cannot do magic outside of school (generally waived if it's an accident), and b.) wizards cannot break the Statute of Secrecy. Harry himself was once charged for breaking these, but acquitted on the grounds of self-defense (against dementors). | |
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In Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book, the boys are put on trial by the Chronological Order. Their representative argues that their changes to the timeline were always supposed to happen and that stopping Bill and Ted's adventures would do more damage to the timeline. | |
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Team Human is set in a world where vampires exist openly, and 10% of attempted "transitions" result in zombies (and another 10% normal death). The vampires have their own police division in town, and a lot of discussion is given to the legal requirements for people who want to transition, laws against Van Helsing Hate Crimes, protests about keeping zombies in labs, etc. | |
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Discworld: In the short story "Theatre of Cruelty", Vimes reflects on the difficulties of policing in a city full of magic, and one of his annoyances is zombies, because it's really hard to conduct a murder investigation when the victim insists on being involved. Snuff: Subverted. Commander Vimes investigates the gruesome murder of a female goblin, but as goblins are incorrectly not considered sapient, the killer can't be charged with murder. Lady Vimes successfully lobbies the rulers of the Disc to have the laws changed, but the killer still can't be charged because it wasn't illegal when the crime was committed (a very real legal principle called ex post facto). Fortunately for the people of the Disc, the killer kills a guard in an escape attempt and is then killed himself by Vimes's retainer. Unseen Academicals: The Igor clan can, if the conditions are right and there's a thunderstorm available, raise the dead. The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has ruled that if someone who was murdered is brought back by an Igor, they were still dead, therefore it was still murder. Since they were only briefly dead, their killer will only be briefly hanged. |
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In A Good Compromise, Jolin Tabris, a Trill lawyer, is fighting a probate case against a joined Trill whose previous host illegally bequeathed half his estate to his next host. Tyria Sark suggests the symbiont is trying to take the case constitutional, and Jolin says he might cite legal precedent to get the will thrown out, namely the case from the last time the same symbiont tried this stunt. | |
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Sentinels of the Multiverse: In one episode of their podcast, the creators go into the legal questions that arise from a universe full of superheroes, including whether they can be sued without knowing their secret identities, whether property damage by the superhero Ra counts as an "Act of God," and whether destroying alchemically created "Fleshchildren" counts as murder or property damage. In-universe there was a comic issue where Baron Blade was tried for his crimes with the Freedom Five's lawyer as the prosecution. Predictably, he got off scot-free because, you know, he's in charge of his own country but not before some legal weirdness happens. | |
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Blindfold, the justice system on the planet Atlas is based around the Truthsayer Guild. These individuals are bred and trained to be able to read minds with the aid of a drug called Veritas, which is strictly illegal for anyone else to use due to the potential for abuse. They use it to determine guilt or innocence by scanning the accused's mind. Every citizen of Atlas has a legal right to be scanned by a Truthsayer, but them being always right and always truthful means that few of those actually guilty will invoke that right, often pleading guilty to a local Magistrate (some of which are washed-out Truthsayers) to get a lighter sentence. A few who think they can trick a Truthsayer or are delusional enough to believe themselves in the right still insist on a reading. Mind readings are public events, and Truthsayer verdicts are final and not subject to appeal. Those convicted of capital crimes are sent to OrbLab 2 to product Veritas in dangerous conditions (there's a potential for a batch of Veritas to mutate into the dangerous Mindfire strain that fries the brain of anyone exposed to it) until the end of their days. | |
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Jessica Jones (2015): One of Jessica's major hurdles is that it's nigh-impossible to force a psychopath with a Compelling Voice like Kilgrave to stand trial, especially when most people don't believe that his powers are real. | |
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Snuff: Subverted. Commander Vimes investigates the gruesome murder of a female goblin, but as goblins are incorrectly not considered sapient, the killer can't be charged with murder. Lady Vimes successfully lobbies the rulers of the Disc to have the laws changed, but the killer still can't be charged because it wasn't illegal when the crime was committed (a very real legal principle called ex post facto). Fortunately for the people of the Disc, the killer kills a guard in an escape attempt and is then killed himself by Vimes's retainer. | |
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Create Your Own Fate has a couple of Courtroom Episodes taking place in Bajoran courts. In the first case, the Bajoran justice system seems more willing than a real-life court to accept an Insanity Defense, probably because of the Occupation leaving a lot of Shellshocked Veterans behind: once a PTSD break is proven, Sheri Walford has her charges reduced from assault and battery and assault on a law enforcement officer, down to misdemeanor assault,note not that a real-life court would necessarily be averse to showing lenience in a case like this; this is Truth in Television reputedly going back to Julius Caesar and is sentenced to community service and mandatory psychiatric counseling. In the second case, Kanril Eleya has her telepathic examiner replace the original witness on the stand after the examination proves the witness was perjuring herself. | |
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Schlock Mercenary: Doctor Bunnigus wonders if a group of immortals that murdered someone should be brought to justice. Petey points out that it happened eleven million years ago. Yes, all the murderers are still alive, but the axe has been buried, the hole subducted, and half the continent became magma. Later, another group of immortals are temporarily killed. They can be easily resurrected, but legally as corpses they have no rights until they are resurrected. Local scavengers fight the people trying to resurrect them so that they can steal their stuff. AI rights are a legal quagmire. On the one hand, full AIs are considered on par with organic sapience, but most of them are still hardwired to obey certain precepts, like the captain of a ship or the admiral of a fleet. Emancipated AIs exist, but are rare. Furthermore, synthetic intelligences (SI) are just as sapient as AIs, just less intelligent, but are treated as mindless automatons that can be sacrificed at a moment's notice. If they become intelligent enough they can cross the "sapience threshold" and gain full rights, but that requires extensive outside hacking. Clones, especially gate-clones, cause many legal problems as well. Perfect clones such as gate-clones are legally considered to be the same person as the original up until the moment of their cloning—so if the original committed a crime and was then cloned, the clone is still responsible for it. In the one case shown, a gate clone is tried and sentenced for the original person killing someone while they were manually driving under the influence - which in-story means disabling the permanent SI autopilot and (usually) having to install a system to be able to drive manually, all of which can only be done when cold sober. The guy didn't make his case any better by sassing the judge. Kathryn jokes that grunts don't quit until they "finally find the time to die." Jengisha points out that with their new super-advanced immortality and resurrection technology, that might not be a valid reason to quit any more. There's also all kinds of trouble early in the comic when the mercs win a lawsuit against a company of cloned attorneys, and are permitted to collect their settlement by killing the clones and turning them in for a bounty. It's pointed out in the notes with the early strips that the clones are organic robots connected to the Collective, each with only a tiny fragment of individuality, and therefore don't "count" as individual sapients. The whole topic is Put on a Bus eventually, rather than discussed. |
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The basis of the film Minority Report (and the Philip K. Dick Short Story it was based on, the Trope Namer of Pre Crime Arrest) is a system that alerts homicide cops to murders before they happen, letting them charge and convict the suspect of first-degree murder before the crime actually takes place. Precrime procedures include having two judges monitoring the investigation by video conference. The legal ramifications are discussed early on: it's noted that the American Civil Liberties Union considers the system unconstitutional, though protagonist John Anderton insists that just because you stopped the murder from happening doesn't change that it would've happened.note Real-life law has murder-related charges that don't require the murder to actually happen (eg, attempted murder, murder for hire) so the argument is slightly weaker than it seems. Under current law, all you could actually charge somebody with in such an instance would be attempted murder or possibly conspiracy to commit. Not only that, but the precogs are more or less slaves, and the mass scans would also be quite illegal in our time (which is why early on it is mentioned that Precrime is still on an experimental phase and thus all the scrutiny before it is passed to cover a larger area than D.C). | |
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The prologue of Don't Say Goodbye, Farewell establishes in passing that you need either the subject's consent or a warrant to use telepathic examination in a criminal investigation: in this case, of an officer whose home planet recently defected from the Federation to the Klingon Empire. Commander Janice Qua refuses and demands an attorney. | |
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The first section of Stranger in a Strange Land is about how the main character, being the first human ever born on Mars, is theoretically its owner. That gets resolved fairly quickly, after which the plot is about him learning about life on Earth and starting a sex cult. | |
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Andrea Vernon and the Corporation for UltraHuman Protection: All superhero work is privatized, and various counties have exclusive contracts with a superhero corporation. The series focuses on the Corporation for Ultra Human Protection (or CUP), which has a contract with the Bronx. There are plenty of legal loops to jump through in order to allow one corporation's superheroes to help out in another area. This comes up in the second book, when a group of supervillains decide to steal the Statue of Liberty. Since it's located in a special federal district, getting involved there involves a lot of red tape. By the time the submitted form goes through one of the many layers of bureaucratic approvals, the statue is long gone. | |
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Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Krillin tries to scam his insurance company by collecting a life insurance policy after he died and was wished back to life with the Dragonballs. It doesn't end well. Later Goku says in reference to a lifetime supply of Hetap: "You know, they say 'lifetime', but they never consider the Dragon Balls..." |
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Hayven Celestia: On Planetary Acquisitions' Generation Ships resources are scarce enough that crew are normally euthanized and recycled at the age of sixty, and most crimes are punished by pushing back the perp's "retirement date". So in effect everything carries a death sentence, the difference is how long it's held off. | |
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In Monster Musume, the "Extraspecies Cultural Exchange Act" has a provision that makes it illegal for a human to harm an extraspecies person or vice-versa (though the latter part is usually ignored for the sake of Slapstick against our unfortunate protagonist). This, of course, brings up issues with law enforcement, as human police officers are prohibited from arresting extraspecies criminals. M.O.N., a small, but specialized team of extraspecies officers created for the specific purpose of making extraspecies arrests, is effectively an Obvious Rule Patch. | |
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Unseen Academicals: The Igor clan can, if the conditions are right and there's a thunderstorm available, raise the dead. The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has ruled that if someone who was murdered is brought back by an Igor, they were still dead, therefore it was still murder. Since they were only briefly dead, their killer will only be briefly hanged. | |
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Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk is a professional lawyer when not superheroing, and the Dan Slott and Charles Soule runs on her solo title, in particular, concentrated on weird legal issues such as somebody suing for compensation because they didn't like the results of their accidental Superhero Origin, or Doctor Doom's son claiming political asylum after a fight with his dad. | |
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Grrl Power: A key part of the comic is the question of how superheroes would realistically be handled, especially legally. Powers are considered a Second Amendment right and do not require registration, but they do not grant a license to act as a vigilante; people who want to play superhero either sign up with the government or are arrested. An entirely new police/military hybrid organization is created to deal with "atypical threats" and employs the bulk of the government's supers, because most existing organizations don't have the proper mandate to deal with that sort of thing. It's also mentioned offhand that flying supers don't technically have to file a flight plan (the law was written with an exception for human-sized flying objects, intended for kites and drones), but it's considered polite to do so. Supers are considered a "Valuable National Resource", yet, there is no Super Registration Act, no drafting and no shuffling supers to a Black Site. If any of those things happened, then supers would go into hiding (which was actually what Sydney was worried about early on), leaving the nation vulnerable to supervillains and foreign supers from countries that embrace and respect them. Not only that, but working as a super both in the private and public sector pays really well. ARCHON's members, super and not, are a domestic military force that is heavily armed. It is pointed out that this would violate posse comitatus. However, that act only applies to the Army; other branches of the military have their own rules that function similarly. ARCHON is a new branch that is not covered under the act, and intentionally does not have any rules preventing use of force on domestic soil. As for why they are military instead of police, it's partly because most of the supers who already work in the government work for the military. Easier to shuffle soldiers to a new branch than to give them honorable discharges and then expect them to report to a civilian law enforcement agency. Sydney is thrown two months into the future. When she comes back, it's only been two days for her, and she asks how her pay will work. At Maxima's insistence, Ariana agrees to split the difference and pay her for a month—but only this time, since it was a relatively small jump. Inverted in a fight against Hench Wench, a henchwoman who gains the powers of her current employer, who exploits corporation law to gain the powers of several supervillains at once, and when they try to fire her (for refusing to surrender long after they did), they have to gather a two-thirds vote of the supervillains, but they didn't know they had to get it ratified by the manager (which they can't because it's Hench Wench); ultimately, the heroes' lawyers have to terminate the contract on ethical grounds to depower her. |
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In a downplayed example in Dwarf Fortress, mummies are undead night creatures created within tombs of deceased rulers but lose their original titles. They thus are referred to by their prior prime occupation such as Beekeeper. | |
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Ascendance of a Bookworm: Name-swearing creates a Can't Live Without You situation of the name-sworn towards their master and is, in many ways, a voluntary form of magically-enforced slavery. It's mentioned in passing that by giving his name to Ferdinand, Eckhart gave up on being able to inherit his family house and any prospect of becoming the next commander of the Knight's Order. | |
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Stargate SG-1: Exploited in "Enigma". Daniel Jackson uses some Loophole Abuse to escape punishment for helping the Tollans to escape to the Nox homeworld after Colonel Maybourne and the NID try to de facto enslave them to get their scientific knowledge. As a civilian, Daniel cannot be Court-martialed for disobeying orders, and as he and Jack O'Neill point out, it'd be hard to find a civilian law to cover this situation.note If you squint, he could maybe be charged with aiding and abetting an escape from custody, but that's assuming that the court both agreed with Maybourne's argument concerning the (biologically human) Tollans' civil rights status, and could conduct a civilian trial in the first place given the secrecy of the stargate program . In "Pretense", human Skaara, host to the Goa'uld Klorel, crash-lands on Tollana. Skaara asks for the Tollans to remove Klorel, Klorel demands to keep possession of Skaara's body, so the Tollans take the matter to "triad" and subpoena SG-1 to act as "archons", a combination of lawyer and jury. |
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Stardoc: Beyond Varallan: Jorenian marriages, called "Choosing", are for life. After Cherijo is Chosen impulsively by her dead husband's brother Xonea (who has been drugged into a hyper-aggressive state by a third party), she eventually gets out from under it by having another physician administer a lethal dose of drugs to herself so she can be declared clinically dead (legally ending the engagement), and waiting for her Healing Factor to revive her. She then quickly gets engaged to her Second Love Duncan to keep the still-drugged Xonea from just Choosing her all over again. | |
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In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang is put on trial for a murder supposedly committed by Avatar Kyoshi, one of his past lives. Unable to come up with another defense, he and his friend resort to trying to summon Kyoshi's spirit to defend herself. It works... except that she confesses to killing the guy. Evidently he was really a warlord trying to conquer what's now Kyoshi Island, and his people gave him a Historical Hero Upgrade. Aang later tries to argue with Kyoshi that it was an Accidental Murder, but Kyoshi says that's splitting hairs, and isn't sorry. She absolutely would have killed him in straight combat if she had to. | |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Played with in "A Man Alone". A black marketeer clones himself and kills the clone to frame Odo for killing him. While arresting him, Odo comments, "Killing your own clone is still murder." "Dax" has the Klaestrons try to extradite Jadzia Dax to try her for a murder allegedly committed by the Dax symbiont's previous host Curzon. Ben Sisko argues extensively that Jadzia and Curzon are not the same personnote Joined Trill with the same symbiont have different personalities and by Trill tradition are considered different individuals, despite later hosts having the memories of preceding hosts. and therefore Jadzia can't be tried in place of Curzon, though the entire proceeding is rendered moot when Odo proves Curzon had an alibi. Sisko's plot in "The Storyteller" has him mediating a border dispute between two Bajoran tribes. An ancient treaty had set a river as their border, but then during the recently ended Occupation the Cardassians diverted the river twenty kilometers to the west. One tribe wants to use the river's old location as the border, the other wants to use the new one. Sisko offers a compromise where the old riverbed remains the official border, but the other tribe is still allowed free access to the river in its new location for trade. Both tribes accept this solution. |
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X-Wing Series: Discussed in The Krytos Trap. Princess Leia tells Wedge that the legal system of the New Republic remains very new so they haven't worked things out entirely, which comes up as Tycho has been charged with murdering Corran. The question has been raised, Leia says, of what jurisdiction a case should be tried in when the defendant and a victim are from different worlds (like here). In the actual case, Tycho's tried on Coruscant, where the alleged murder occurred (he and Corran are both from other planets), as is the most logical course anyway.note As both the defendant and the victim were active-duty New Republic Defense Force officers, a Court Martial probably should have jurisdiction regardless of this question, but as mentioned, the New Republic is having to make things up as it goes along. | |
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In Rashomon, one of the witnesses at a murder trial is a medium speaking on behalf of the victim. It doesn't actually help much; in this case, there was never any question about who killed him and the hearing is more about why and whether there were mitigating circumstances, on which points the victim is just as self-centered and unreliable as all the other witnesses. | |
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Distress by Greg Egan: Police in the futuristic setting can use powerful drugs to revive murder victims for a few minutes in hopes that they'll testify. It's terribly painful for the victims and is ambiguous whether it brings them Back from the Dead or merely animates their corpses, so the practice is being challenged on ethical grounds in-universe. | |
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Steven Universe: The title character is sort-of-kind-of the Reincarnation of his dead mom, Rose Quartz. The Homeworld Gems, who for the most part don't even understand human reproduction, basically take this to mean that Steven is Rose Quartz in a human body, and put him on trial for the assassination of Pink Diamond. Pearl at one point mentions how she doesn't have a driver's license since, as a millennia-old alien who's rarely interacted with humans, she's "not exactly a citizen." A throwaway line makes explicit that Greg and Rose never technically married, making Steven a Heroic Bastard. Bizarrely, Steven lists his Social Security Number as "N/A" in Steven Universe: Future, implying having an alien mother who disappeared giving birth left him undocumented. However, Steven still drives a car regularly without any fear of getting arrested. |
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Played with in The Four Gospels. In Matthew 22:23-30 and Luke 20:27-40 (two versions of what was probably same incident), a group of Saducees ask Jesus a tricky question about a hypothetical woman who has been married multiple times: whose wife is she on Judgement Day? In both gospels, Jesus answers that at the resurrection, no one's marital status matters anymore, so the question is moot. | |
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Mass Effect: There's a lot of weird laws, mostly as background details, but the three that are immediately relevant to the story are genetics, Prothean artifacts, and AI research. Transhumanism exists, but the law prevents adding any new abilities to a species. So increased muscle and bone density are fine (and standard for soldiers), but giving a human the ability to photosynthesize is illegal. This also prevents genetically engineering new creatures and the like. It's mentioned that because of this, the human-made medi-gel is technically illegal, but it's just so useful that it's given a pass. Prothean artifacts are Lost Technology that form the backbone of the galaxy. The Mass Relays, in particular, are what make intragalactic travel possible at all. Therefore, messing with them in any capacity is illegal unless you have specific and explicit permission from very high-ranking people. In the first game, a scientist can't even perform non-destructive scans on the Keepers who maintain the Citadel because everyone is just that scared of causing some sort of problem. It's even more illegal to activate any new Mass Relays if you don't know what's on the other end, because the most recent one caused the Rachni War. This is all part of the plot cooked up by the Reapers. They created the Mass Relays, the Citadel and the Keepers and made them crucial to galactic civilization while also making sure nobody really figures out how they actually work until it's too late. Every Artificial Intelligence ever recorded has immediately Turned Against Their Masters. Because of this, AI is extremely restricted, with only a few corporations being (officially) allowed to do R&D into AIs and only on specific planets. Non-sapient "Virtual Intelligences" are common, but they're basically just well-developed user interfaces and immediately show problems if you try to use them for something outside what they were designed for. In the backstory, the quarians loopholed around the ban by creating a race of VIs with networking abilities so that they could share information. It didn't take long for the geth as a whole to cross the sapience threshold and rebel (according to quarian sources, at least), even if individually they remained but fancy calculators. |
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Spider-Man: Far From Home: The people who were "Blipped" (when Thanos killed half the universe in Avengers: Infinity War and Hulk resurrected them in Avengers: Endgame) lost five years, but are still legally treated as the ages they were before. Students even had to retake the school year, to their annoyance since they had already finished midterms. The problem is that the paperwork hasn't quite caught up; on the airplane, Flash is able to get a hold of alcohol because his ID says he was born twenty-one years ago. When MJ tells a stewardess that he was Blipped, she immediately confiscates his drink. | |
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Super Powereds: In the US, only licensed Heroes are permitted to use their powers to fight criminal Supers. Any other Super doing so it considered a vigilante and is subject to arrest. To get licensed, a Super has to enroll in a Hero Certification Program at one of the five universities offering the four-year program. Out of nearly a hundred annual applicants, only ten get to graduate each year. This is to ensure that only the best of the best are allowed to protect the public. And even after that, the graduates have to intern under an active Hero for two years before they can go off on their own. The Department of Variant Human Affairs (DVA) monitors all Heroes and ensures that they don't step out of line. Heroes that cause too much damage (either by being careless or by unintentionally causing criminal Supers to harm others) can be stripped of their Hero license. Outside of Hero work, Supers can be employed as emergency workers, either as police or fire department contractors or working for private companies as PEERS (Privately Employed Emergency Response Supers). They're allowed to use their powers to rescue people, but they are forbidden from engaging criminal Supers, except in self-defense. It's not stated much about how other nations handle their Supers, but it's vaguely stated that some others have tried making their Supers work for the police or the military, but this made them seem oppressive. The American model turns Heroes into, well, heroes. | |
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Tachyon: The Fringe: The background of the game is that the Bora colonists left Earth decades ago to seek their fortunes in unsettled space and, due to their separatist politics, never bothered to file any kind of paperwork with Sol's government (which evidently claims jurisdiction over all of space) to claim it. This bites them in the ass when the Galactic Spanning Corporation does file the paperwork and tries to evict the Bora, who sue to overturn GalSpan's claim; Sol's supreme court sides with GalSpan, arguing there's no such thing as, quote, "squatter's rights". The Bora don't take this lying down, driving the main plot of the game. | |
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People in Chainsaw Man can enter in contracts with devils where they offer aspects of themselves (like their lifespan or body parts). Presumably since it runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, government officials can offer up the lives of any of their own people, without their consent or even knowledge. The US President ends up offering the Gun Devil a year of every American's life to kill Makima. Makima herself has a deal with the Prime Minister of Japan where the injuries she received from any attack are transferred to a random Japanese person. | |
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Star Trek: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data is an android and a member of Starfleet, which leads to several questions about his citizenship and civil rights: In his backstory, a council had to be convened on whether he was eligible to join Starfleet as a person. In "The Measure of a Man", a trial is held to determine whether Data should be considered a piece of Starfleet property rather than a person. In "The Offspring", there's a similar question of whether Data should be allowed to "procreate" (create an android similar to himself, i.e. title character Lal) without Starfleet approval. Betazoid empaths can be used to tell whether witnesses are lying or not, although this does result in false positives at times if the witness is holding back about something that isn't related to the matter they're being questioned on. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Played with in "A Man Alone". A black marketeer clones himself and kills the clone to frame Odo for killing him. While arresting him, Odo comments, "Killing your own clone is still murder." "Dax" has the Klaestrons try to extradite Jadzia Dax to try her for a murder allegedly committed by the Dax symbiont's previous host Curzon. Ben Sisko argues extensively that Jadzia and Curzon are not the same personnote Joined Trill with the same symbiont have different personalities and by Trill tradition are considered different individuals, despite later hosts having the memories of preceding hosts. and therefore Jadzia can't be tried in place of Curzon, though the entire proceeding is rendered moot when Odo proves Curzon had an alibi. Sisko's plot in "The Storyteller" has him mediating a border dispute between two Bajoran tribes. An ancient treaty had set a river as their border, but then during the recently ended Occupation the Cardassians diverted the river twenty kilometers to the west. One tribe wants to use the river's old location as the border, the other wants to use the new one. Sisko offers a compromise where the old riverbed remains the official border, but the other tribe is still allowed free access to the river in its new location for trade. Both tribes accept this solution. Star Trek: Voyager: In "Author, Author, the Doctor, a sapient hologram, sent in a holo-novel he wrote for publication; however, the publisher then decided to publish an early draft without his permission, on the grounds that he had no legal rights to stop it. The Doctor then sues his publisher for copyright infringement, and while the arbitrator stops short of giving him full legal personhood, he does grant the Doctor the legal status of "author", meaning he can own a copyright. Interestingly, Captain Janeway's testimony of the Doctor having disobeyed orders in the past was used as evidence that he did, in fact, have free will. |
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Black Mirror: Almost every episode has some facet of near-future life which would make legal matters incredibly difficult: "White Bear" asks the viewers to determine what is or is not Mind Rape via repeated torture and induced amnesia. The plot of "White Christmas" revolves around tricking a confession out of a digital mind upload of a man in interrogation. The legal ramifications of that are... shaky, at best. |
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In the world of Girl Genius, there are a wide variety of ways to bring someone Back from the Dead to varying degrees. Unsurprisingly, this does not mesh well with a social structure based on inheritance, so the Fifty Families have an ironclad rule that once you're dead, your titles and lands pass to your heirs even if you later get brought back. It's also mentioned that there have been cases of people trying to conceal the fact that they've been killed and resurrected so that they don't lose their lands and privileges to their next of kin. Also, Klaus Wulfenbach doesn't obey this rule, because his rule isn't based on royal legitimacy, but on superior firepower. | |
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Red Markets: The remnants of the US government can't officially acknowledge the existence of the Red Market (the underground economy between the safe zone of the Recession and the zombie infested wasteland of the Loss), because all those citizens left behind were declared legally dead. You can't prosecute a dead person. | |
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Work Ethic: There are legal systems in place that prosecute Cogs that try to take advantage of Incogs, Monster leaving Kristine and her Dad the number to an agency that will help reimburse them for their house after it's destroyed by pixies. | |
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This is basically the concept of the blog Law and the Multiverse, which is written by a professional lawyer who speculates on how would the plots of superhero comic books work within the framework of American law. | |
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Tantabus Mark II: It's Luna's job (and she creates the Tantabus to help her) to patrol the dreams of all ponies to protect them from nightmares and encourage good dreams. While helping a cop, the Tantabus realizes there's very little stopping them from just finding criminals through their dreams and giving the information to the police. Luna decides very firmly that this is a breach of privacy and outside their jurisdiction. Criminals actually using dream magic to commit crimes are another story, but there are like five of those per year. Pharynx asks if Luna and Moondog patrol changeling dreams. Luna points out that this would, at best, be the cause of a diplomatic incident and a patronizing breach of another nation's sovereign defense. It also turns out that Pharynx is officially Lord Protector of the Changelings, which means that Moondog is very hesitant about interacting with him because even teaching him dream magic has serious diplomatic implications. Luna promotes Moondog to Duchess of Dreams to make things a bit easier for everyone. |
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My Hero Academia: The opening narration notes that governments have had a hard time reworking laws for the sudden appearance of Quirks, which now appear in 80% of all people. Superheroes seem to have originally been self-employed vigilantes who became legalized and regulated because of broad public support, but unregistered heroes are still illegal. It's illegal to use your Quirk to harm another, even in self defence, unless you have a hero license. This is presented as both extremely restrictive (particularly when Izuku and his friends technically broke the law to capture Stain) but necessary to prevent chaos. My Hero Academia: Vigilantes: It's mentioned that it's actually illegal to use a Quirk in public under any circumstances unless you have a Hero License. That being said, while in theory it's extremely restrictive, in practice it's only brought up in the worst cases. No one cares that Koichi uses his Quirk to slide around the ground all the time; one hard-line cop gives him a bit of a talking-to, but that's the worst of it. It's only when Quirks cause a disruption that the police get involved. Likewise, the pro heroes repeatedly let obvious cases of self-defense slide. Vigilantes also has trouble with the "instant villains." They are ordinary people who took a drug that boosts their Quirks to unmanageable levels, often with some mind-affecting drugs mixed in to make them behave irrationally. Despite them going on rampages, there's not much the police can do to legally prosecute them, as the drug itself is technically not illegal. It gets worse when people start getting dosed without their knowledge or consent. The heroes have to treat them as both villains to be stopped and bystanders to be saved at the same time. People with extreme Quirk mutations are treated as having a disability. Kirihito and Ikajiro, after being modified by Villain Factory, can't get normal jobs or indeed even fit in a normal building. They get welfare from the government, which their friends use to build a cafe big enough to handle people like them. Some of the worst and most dangerous criminals in the world are kept permanently imprisoned because, with their Quirks, there is not actually a way to humanely execute them. |
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In GURPS Technomancer, US courts have been dealing with the existence of magic for fifty years. The Compel Truth spell is the big example of this trope: it's constitutionalnote Since the subject is only prevented from lying – NOT from remaining silent – its use does not violate the Fifth Amendment., every witness who takes the stand has to take it, and it's a big help in getting the innocent exonerated. Resisting it is treated as contempt of court, and the court-approved wizard or bailiff casting it will instantly notice if you resisted. A Longer-Than-Life Sentence is possible in Louisiana, where people can be sentenced to death and zombie labor. Elsewhere, raising zombies is considered illegal desecration of a corpse. Being under Mind Manipulation is obviously an absolute defense in a criminal trial. Youth elixir is new enough that the courts are currently fighting over its implications; among other things, they haven't worked out whether a chronological and mental adult in a thirteen-year-old body can legally act in a pornographic film. |
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The whole concept of Wizard Barristers is lawyers who defend and prosecute magical criminals. | |
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The main thrust of Jupiter Ascending is that the main character is an exact genetic duplicate of a deceased Human Alien. As such, she is considered her "genetic reincarnation" and inherits all of her property...which includes the planet Earth. (There was a will made ahead of time, though.) | |
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Dante Valentine: Psions (the official name for magic-users in the books' Science Fantasy world) are often legally accredited professionals whose abilities are admissible in court. Necromances like Danny (able to channel spirits and raise the recently dead) are often hired to settle probate matters by directly asking the deceased what they want done with their estate. She also mentions she charges extra for criminal cases, and gets very cross with the attorney when hired for a probate only to discover that the decedent was murdered by one of the heirs. | |
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Legend of the Five Rings: Despite ghosts being relatively common in Rokugan, the legal system specifies that testimony from ghosts is inadmissible in court. They have no consequences for lying, and even honorable ghosts can be manipulated with magic. A few adventures and stories involve the PCs getting told by a ghost who killed them, and having to find other evidence to prove it. | |
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Garrett, P.I.: There are laws on the books which safeguard the status of the ruling royal and noble families against magical tampering. Most notably, making animated simulacra of people is highly illegal because of the risk of imposture, and even Karenta's king is subject to mandatory testing to prove he's not undead if his chief officials collectively demand he do so. | |
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Civil War (2006) compared people having superpowers to people having firearms: registration and training was a must to prevent trouble (because of a penchant of mass destruction that followed), and so the Superhuman Registration Act came to pass.note Apparently overlooked was the fact that neither registration nor training actually is required to own firearms in the United States and attempts to impose such laws on a national level have always failed. Perhaps because the lead writer was Mark Millar, who lives in Scotland where such restrictions are very much in place and apparently has very little knowledge of American Gun Politics. The situation became much more complicated when people in the government decided to use it as a reason to unleash the Day of the Jackboot upon innocent Americans. Its continuation was mostly fueled by a discussion whether applying the Pre Crime Arrest was unconstitutional or not (doubly so when the visions that led to said arrests were proven to be unreliable). | |
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Last Enemy from his Paratime universe gives us a society in which reincarnation has now been proven, so their view of death is far more relaxed. Assassination is a legal profession because of this (though there are certain rules, such as no nukes). Near the end of the story, lawsuits start to be launched by people trying to recover property they had in their past lives, though we don't see whether any succeed. | |
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The Reluctant King: In "The Unbeheaded King" there's a brief discussion by ghost Baron Lorc who had been a magistrate while alive if he's still got authority to perform a divorce. Since there's no law saying a ghost can't be a magistrate so far as he knows, Lorc concludes his office is still in effect and grants the divorce. | |
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Aeon 14: AIs govern themselves by intellectocracy and have their own separate court system to deal with AIs that commit crimes, which is said to be harsher than the legal system for organics in the then-current Sol Space Federation. We get a glimpse of it early in Airthan Ascendancy when Carmen, an AI and officer in the Intrepid Space Force, is prosecuted for dereliction of duty.spoiler In War on a Thousand Fronts, she assisted Justin's Transcend renegades in disabling the Self-Destruct Mechanism on the ship she was stationed on, rather than ensure it blew and therefore keeping the ISF technologies aboard—especially stasis shields—from falling into enemy hands. The AIs accept mitigating factorsnote She managed to turn one of Justin's crew, Roxy, and recovered the ship. and sentence her to a "Limitation"—new code forbidding her from ever being a ship's AI again—and a requirement for her core to be installed in a human for the next ten years. | |
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Domina: The city was originally populated by criminals and abandoned by the mainland soon after. Therefore, the local laws are very loose and structured mostly around swift, harsh punishment. There are no prisons to speak of, and the primary punishment is "retribution;" if a crime is committed, a neutral judge assigns a penalty that the victim can inflict on the perpetrator. These punishments can be fines, but for more serious crimes summary execution is granted. Furthermore, if no one calls for retribution, no one will bother trying to interfere, and the two parties are pretty much allowed to just kill each other with impunity. The government only gets involved if the conflict starts to spill over to bystanders. | |
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In Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, Aurors are saddled with a wonderfully verbose version of the British police caution in order to plug in the extra legal loopholes that being magical might present. Legal buffs might care to notice that in the Wizarding version, the right to remain silent (which is front and center in the Caution and Miranda) is the second-to-last thing mentioned. Also please note that unlike the caution, this one is to be recited upon arrest (or when the suspect wakes up from all the stunning spells), not interrogation. It reads as follows: | |
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Transformers: Animated: Sari Sumdac quickly loses any say in how her father's company is run because there's no proof she legally exists. Since she was born from a Cybertronian protoform and Issac's DNA, he had no way to claim her as his actual daughter, instead just raising her himself. | |
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In El Goonish Shive, Earth-born Uryuoms, despite being members of an extraterrestrial species are legally citizens of the country on Earth they were born in (at least for those born in a country with birthright citizenship) and thus not legally "aliens". In fact, as noted by William, American-born Uryuoms could technically legally run for President. However, given that the Masquerade is still somewhat in effect (at least in the main universe), in practice, Uryuoms have no legal standing whatsoever because their very existence is kept secret from the public. | |
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The Jenkinsverse: Humans were considered non-sentient indigenous fauna by the Dominion before the Kevin Jenkins incident. Furthermore, the Dominion's bureaucracy considered it impossible for sentient life to evolve on a Deathworld like Earth, thus even individual abductees couldn't be considered sentient. However, one Xiú Chang got around this rule because she was adopted by the Gaoian clan of Females, and thus legally a Gaoian. After the incident on the Outlook to Forever station got enough public attention, the "no deathworld sentients" rule was scrapped and the requirements for sentience were lowered from having invented Faster-Than-Light Travel to calculus, giving humans the same legal rights and protections everyone else enjoyed. A Corti swore on a printout of the universal physical constants in court because non-deathworlder aliens are all atheists. Also a case of Hollywood Law for the sake of Rule of Funny, as Cimbrean is a British colony and since 1695 you're allowed to affirm that you're telling the truth instead of swearing by God (and it's not like swearing that has kept everyone from perjury anyway). |
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Intelligence Factor: Audino are sometimes put on trial for assisting Zoroark in Unova, even though they can't legally be prosecuted because they're not considered people. | |
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Bizarrely, Steven lists his Social Security Number as "N/A" in Steven Universe: Future, implying having an alien mother who disappeared giving birth left him undocumented. However, Steven still drives a car regularly without any fear of getting arrested. | |
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Amazing Fantasy: In the chaos of the appearance of Quirks, so many people tried to run around pretending to be comic book superheroes (namely, Spider-Man) that comic book companies went cease-and-desist-crazy. All Might casually grumbles at one point that his "Silver Age" costume became a casualty of DC Comics and Izuku Midoriya (who gets powers from, and outright blessing from, Spider-Man himself) gets an attempted strong-arm from Marvel Comics lawyers (humanoid vultures). | |
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Eleutherophobia is a series of Animorphs fics that takes place in The Unmasqued World, so it has plenty of this: A news programme in Lost World mentions someone whose life sentence for murdering his elderly neighbour was overturned because it turned out he was a Controller at the time. Total Recall is about Esplin's trial. Since courts on Earth have never had to deal with cases of possession before, the defence were able to throw out his former host Alloran's testimony because they considered it self-incrimination, just like in canon. There's also the Vicky Austin argument, which incriminates ex-hosts for not Fighting from the Inside hard enough, named after a Controller who committed suicide on live television. In Ghost in the Shell, Steve mentions that there's now a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that forbids taking on someone else's physical form through morphing or infestation. Discussed in How I Live Now. Cassie says it would be illegal for the bus company to not let Toby (who's covered in natural blades) on the bus; Rachel is shocked to learn there are anti-discrimination laws for aliens. |
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When an immortal man dies in The Sandman (1989)'s "Brief Lives" arc, his son worries about what to do with all his hidden riches and fake identities throughout the years. | |
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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: The banks, overwhelmed by the sudden flush of loan applications, have been using the Blip as an excuse not to approve loans. These people were missing with no income for five years; on paper, that is extremely suspicious. Of course, it is public knowledge that these people were dead for those five years, and it happened to a randomly distributed half of the entire universe, so this is a problem billions of people have just on Earth. This is a clear case of discrimination, but the Blipped are not a legally protected class (though it's implied with Sam Wilson and his sister that a more old-fashioned kind of discrimination is also at work). Elsewhere in the world, Blipped people are being prioritized by the Global Repatriation Commission (the international body set up to handle the crises caused by half the world's population coming back to life at once) at the expense of the un-Blipped: among other things, the Blipped getting their prior property, jobs, and finances returned to them by the GRC has led to displaced un-Blipped people ending up in refugee camps. This has motivated Western Terrorists such as the Flag Smashers to raid banks and warehouses to get resources to the refugees—as well as using car bombs against the GRC itself. |
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Astro City: In one storyline, attorney Vincent Oleck is defending a mobster who had murdered someone in front of dozens of witnesses used a "superhero defense", pointing out known cases of crimes actually committed the accused's evil twin from another dimension, supposedly dead people getting up and walking away none the worse for wear, etc. Between the sheer audacity of the argument and a mood of public guilt over the recent wrongful execution of the Silver Agent, it worked. The case also became a landmark in American legal praxis, and led to changes in how cases with metahuman involvement were handled. Lampshaded later when Oleck states that there is no way that defense would fly in the comic's present day. Another story looks at legal services in Shadow Hill, the city's supernatural district. Ghosts can be called up to settle their disputed wills; when a magician discovers their spells are contracts with higher powers, they can get a lawyer to figure out the terms; and vampires and other quasi-immortals can hire professional Renfields to help with their financial holdings, transferring the holdings to the Renfield when they die (or appear to), and the Renfield transferring the holdings back to them (minus a commission for the service) when they show up with a new identity. In "Where the Action Is", super-heroine Nightingale angrily confronts publisher Manny Monkton for insinuating that she is in a lesbian relationship with her sidekick Sunbird. He blows off the complaint, noting that she can't sue him without revealing her Secret Identity. |
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Anita Blake: Anita's day job as an animator often involves raising the dead to settle estate matters. Zombies can be raised to settle things like disputes over which version of a will is accurate or not, but they make terrible witnesses in court cases, since they can really only respond to the animator who raised them, and the animator has to ask very specific questions, thus opening them to objections for leading the witness. Zombies are also useless when they've been murdered, as a murdered zombie will, no matter how powerful the animator who raised them is, beeline straight for their murderer and attempt to kill them. It might be useful for the police to track down the killer, but not exactly admissible evidence in a court of law (to say nothing of potential countersuits for siccing a mad zombie on someone without due process). | |
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GURPS: In GURPS Technomancer, US courts have been dealing with the existence of magic for fifty years. The Compel Truth spell is the big example of this trope: it's constitutionalnote Since the subject is only prevented from lying – NOT from remaining silent – its use does not violate the Fifth Amendment., every witness who takes the stand has to take it, and it's a big help in getting the innocent exonerated. Resisting it is treated as contempt of court, and the court-approved wizard or bailiff casting it will instantly notice if you resisted. A Longer-Than-Life Sentence is possible in Louisiana, where people can be sentenced to death and zombie labor. Elsewhere, raising zombies is considered illegal desecration of a corpse. Being under Mind Manipulation is obviously an absolute defense in a criminal trial. Youth elixir is new enough that the courts are currently fighting over its implications; among other things, they haven't worked out whether a chronological and mental adult in a thirteen-year-old body can legally act in a pornographic film. One article in Pyramid, "Above the Law," focuses on superhumans and the law, and explains how a Super Registration Act might work if powers were treated like tools or weapons. Transmutating matter can wreck economies, ESP of any sort is a nightmare for privacy laws, and there's a dilemma on whether it's moral to confine someone just for existing if they have Person of Mass Destruction powers (each campaign world will have its own answer to that). |
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Ace Attorney: Much of the series centers around the integration of spirit mediums (whose powers are legitimate, albeit as fallible as any other form of testimony) into otherwise mundane courts. The DL-6 case was especially infamous because it soured both sides: traditional lawyers were angry because the police secretly consulted mediums to decide whom to prosecute, and the mediums were angry because their involvement got leaked to the press and ruined their reputation. Spirit-channeling is eventually recognized as legally legitimate, but only after a lot of people work very hard to prove it so... particularly Mia Fey, the first medium to become a lawyer. Notably, the next guy who tries to use channeling as evidence does it in the open, allowing people to judge for themselves whether channeling is inadmissible or not. The kingdom of Khura'in has the opposite problem: all magic, no ordinary investigations or legal debate. Because neither mediums or ghosts are incorruptible—and even well-intentioned ghosts can misinterpret events—Khura'in has devolved into a Wretched Hive. |
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In PS238, Tyler gets cloned, and his parents adopt the new "twin." Apparently, there's enough legal precedent for this sort of thing that "Toby" gets added to the system and enrolled in school without much hassle. | |
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Eldraeverse: Given its universe is largely dominated by a Society of Immortal Transhumanist Space Elves who consider oaths and contracts to be the cornerstone of civilization, the series frequently examines how various matters of law might work out in a society where death as we know it is more of an inconvenience. | |
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Durarara!!: Celty rides around on a jet-black motorcycle with no lights or plates, but she insists it's fine because he's actually a magic horse. In the second season, the cops decide that's not good enough and start chasing her down whenever she shows up. After arguing back and forth for a while, Celty points out that the law does have a specific exception written in for horses, so she doesn't need to have lights or plates. The cops counter that she still needs to obey the posted speed limit, which she doesn't. | |
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Star Trek: Voyager: In "Author, Author, the Doctor, a sapient hologram, sent in a holo-novel he wrote for publication; however, the publisher then decided to publish an early draft without his permission, on the grounds that he had no legal rights to stop it. The Doctor then sues his publisher for copyright infringement, and while the arbitrator stops short of giving him full legal personhood, he does grant the Doctor the legal status of "author", meaning he can own a copyright. Interestingly, Captain Janeway's testimony of the Doctor having disobeyed orders in the past was used as evidence that he did, in fact, have free will. | |
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Eva: It's mentioned that despite being a chimp now, Eva is still legally human, so she doesn't belong to anyone — unlike the chimps used for research. Eva objects to any chimps being considered property. | |
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Legends of Tomorrow: Nora Darhk is from a decade or so in the future, so when she tries to join the present-day Time Bureau, the automated system keeps denying her because current records say she's fifteen years old and in a mental institution. | |
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The central premise behind She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the existence of a "Superhuman Law" division specifically created to deal with Fantastic Legal Weirdness. Typical cases include whether or not the Mystic Arts of Kamar-Taj can be bound by a non-disclosure agreement, whether superhero codenames can be trademarked, and the nuances of divorce proceedings when one party has Resurrective Immortality and is abusing it to get out of marriages at the first sign of trouble by comitting suicide. | |
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Artemis Fowl: Fairies Must Be Invited into a human residence, the exact details of which are apparently decided by a committee. (It's still a supernatural process, however—fairies who accidentally break the rules become ill, and repeat offenders lose their magic.) Aside from relying on Exact Words, the first book mentions that fairy cops can consider a call for help to be an invitation. Signs welcoming you to a building also count. | |
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The Weekly Roll: Torvald is a necromancer who reanimates the corpses of fellow dwarves as Undead Laborers... with their permission, once they died of natural causes, and after they've signed a contract. Even so, dwarven law enforcers are after him, but only because he didn't pay taxes on the income earned. Then it turns out what Torvald owes is less than what the party spends on booze in a week, so Becket pays for him, making Torvald in his debt (paying Becket back is not an option). And then it turns out the enforcers are a squad answering to the queen of the dwarves, who is Torvald's mother-in-law and thus possibly willing to Screw the Rules, I Make Them! Dwarf law is weird. | |
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Babylon 5: One of the established rules of Earth Alliance law is that evidence obtained via telepathy is not admissible in legal proceedings. On the other hand, people conducting business or diplomatic negotiations routinely retain low-level telepaths (such as supporting cast member Talia Winters) to mediate the talks and ensure both parties are being honest. "Grail" contains a one-off gag where a human sues a Vree (one of the show's alien species, which visually resemble The Greys and In-Universe are the reason this Ufology belief exists) for reparations because the Vree's ancestor abducted his ancestor (according to commentary, the Vree's defense essentially is that all Vree look alike, while the man boasts of having apparently bullet-proof evidence that identifies said Vree's ancestor as the one who did the abduction). The judge rolls his eyes and asks for an interpreter for the Vree (who responded to the charge by drawing a symbol); we never hear how the case ends. In "The Geometry of Shadows", the Drazi select a new government every five years by drawing scarves colored green and purple from a barrel, then dividing themselves up by color and beating the crap out of each other. After the Green Drazi on the station start killing Purple Drazi, Ivanova grabs the Green Leader's scarf while arguing with him, and is informed that she is now the Green Leader. |
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In the DCU any confessions given by suspects under the effects of Wonder Woman's lasso of truth are not admissible in court, unless the suspect themselves requests it, and even then the jury is meant not to treat any such statements as more inherently true than any other, though the public's perception and knowledge of the lasso tend to undermine this. Such statements are considered coerced. | |
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Mob Psycho 100: After Reigen's office is burned down by a pyrokinetic psychic, his insurance agency delay payment because they can't figure out what would cause a fire like that without fuel. This suddenly makes Reigen determined to fight Claw so he can take whoever did it to the agency and legitimize his claim. His claim goes through when it turns out to be an electrical fire that had nothing to do with the other fire that was caused by a psychic. | |
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Jill Kismet: Werewolf and hunter units work as credentialed FBI Agents (as well as independently a la the title character), and the series mentions a few times that FEMA funds can be used for major supernatural incidents. | |
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The premise of the Craft Sequence is that it takes place in a world where magic is the same thing as contract law. Therefore, the average legal dispute is indistinguishable from a Wizard Duel. The first book involves a god dying and needing to be resurrected, which plays out identically to a bankruptcy proceeding. | |
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Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data is an android and a member of Starfleet, which leads to several questions about his citizenship and civil rights: In his backstory, a council had to be convened on whether he was eligible to join Starfleet as a person. In "The Measure of a Man", a trial is held to determine whether Data should be considered a piece of Starfleet property rather than a person. In "The Offspring", there's a similar question of whether Data should be allowed to "procreate" (create an android similar to himself, i.e. title character Lal) without Starfleet approval. Betazoid empaths can be used to tell whether witnesses are lying or not, although this does result in false positives at times if the witness is holding back about something that isn't related to the matter they're being questioned on. |
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