Source: http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2012/03/
Timestamp: 2015-04-19 19:05:06
Document Index: 800933677

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 655', '§ 9601', '§ 1362', '§ 7602', '§ 496', '§ 18', '§ 2']

March | 2012 | Law and the Multiverse
This time, we’re going to look at another angle: potential culpability for spectators and sponsors. Continue reading →
Posted in criminal law, movies	Ghostbusters and the EPA
Posted on March 28, 2012 by James Daily | 18 comments
Today’s post is inspired by an email from Casey, who wondered about a couple of issues in the movie Ghostbusters. Specifically, was Ray Stantz really a “duly-designated representative of the City, County and State of New York” with any kind of legal authority to order Gozer the Gozerian to leave the city? And did the EPA have a legal basis for shutting down the Ghostbusters’ containment unit?
I. Were the Ghostbusters Duly-Designated Representatives of New York?
It’s pretty strongly implied in the movie that the mayor of New York authorizes the Ghostbusters to deal with the threat posed by Gozer. That much covers the city.
Moving one level up, we turn to the county. The five boroughs of New York City are each coterminous with a county. For example, New York County covers the same area as Manhattan. The New York County government is pretty vestigial, with most ordinarily-county-level functions handled by the city. There are some borough-level officials, such as the Manhattan Borough President’s office, but it has a comparatively tiny budget and is mostly concerned with land use and zoning. Still, there’s no reason to think that the Ghostbusters couldn’t be appointed to represent New York County as well.
Finally there’s the state level. New York City obviously has a fair amount of clout in the state of New York, and we suspect the Mayor would have no trouble convincing the governor to give the Ghostbusters state authority in this situation, especially since it was geographically confined to New York City.
So what kind of authorization could there be? One possibility is that the Ghostbusters could have been made emergency special deputies “for the protection of human life and property during an emergency.” N.Y. County Law § 655. That would give the Ghostbusters the powers of regular police officers. Not actually very helpful against an ancient Sumerian deity, but it’s something. At the very least the qualified immunity would potentially prevent them from being personally liable for collateral damage.
Strictly speaking, all of this state authority would have little effect on the EPA’s jurisdiction (to the extent it has any) or the federal government’s ability to arrest the Ghostbusters or order the shutdown of their facility, but we can assume that the Regional Director of the EPA (actually titled the Regional Administrator), who was present at the mayor’s office, took care of all that.
II. Are Ghosts a Pollutant?
Walter Peck, from the EPA’s “third district,”* thinks the Ghostbusters are scam artists using dangerous chemicals to produce hallucinations and storing hazardous materials in their headquarters. He alleges that they are in criminal violation of the Environmental Protection Act**, and for some reason, this leads him to shut off the containment grid, resulting in all of the captured ghosts being released.
* The EPA actually divides the country into regions. Region 2 covers New York.
** There is no such federal law in the United States. Federal environmental law is a hodgepodge of laws: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, just to name some of the big ones. There’s no Environmental Protection Act, though.
Peck is wrong about the Ghostbusters, but if they were storing and releasing hallucinogenic substances then that could qualify as pollution. For example, under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (aka CERCLA aka Superfund) “pollutant or contaminant”
shall include, but not be limited to, any element, substance, compound, or mixture, including disease-causing agents, which after release into the environment and upon exposure, ingestion, inhalation, or assimilation into any organism, either directly from the environment or indirectly by ingestion through food chains, will or may reasonably be anticipated to cause death, disease, behavioral abnormalities, cancer, genetic mutation, physiological malfunctions (including malfunctions in reproduction) or physical deformations, in such organisms or their offspring
42 U.S.C. § 9601(33). That’s pretty dang broad and would definitely include hallucinogenic gases.
One problem with Peck’s actions is that most of the enforcement mechanisms for pollution control are civil, not criminal, and even in the criminal case there would have to be a trial before any penalties could be assessed. In fact, it would probably be easier and faster for the EPA to get a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction in a civil case than to seek criminal penalties.
But we can gloss over all of those issues. What we really want to know is whether ghosts could qualify as a pollutant. Of course, for most purposes nothing is a pollutant unless it is discharged into the environment, and the Ghostbusters were doing a good job of preventing that. But were the ghosts at least a potential pollutant?
I think they could be, at least under some environmental laws. The fact that ghosts are, in some sense, living organisms doesn’t seem to matter. For example, disease-causing organisms such as viruses and bacteria can be considered pollutants for purposes of the Clean Water Act. 33 U.S.C. § 1362(13) (defining “toxic pollutant” to include disease-causing agents that cause, among other things, behavior abnormalities); 66 C.F.R. 2960 (describing pathogens as a “leading pollutant” in bodies of water). The Clean Air Act likewise defines “air pollutant” to include biological substances or matter that enters the air. 42 U.S.C. § 7602(g).
So it appears that the federal government could potentially regulate the release of ghosts into the environment. Since the Ghostbusters never (voluntarily) released any ghosts, however, I’m not sure the EPA would have much standing to complain.
If the movie had been written so that a ghost or two escaped the Ghostbusters’ containment system, the EPA might have been on firmer legal footing. Alternatively, the EPA might have been able to go after the potential discharge of radiation from the Ghostbusters’ proton packs.
Still, apart from some technical mistakes and omitted detail to keep the plot moving, the legal issues here were pretty minor. The EPA is probably the right agency, to the extent any federal agency is the correct one, and we can forgive the writers for not wanting to get bogged down with administrative hearings and settlement talks.
Posted in administrative law, criminal law, criminal procedure, mailbag, movies	Superman: Grounded (# 707): Theft, Necessity, Insurance, and Mitigation of Damages
Posted in criminal law, insurance, superheroes, Superman, torts	Superman, Duels, and Affray
Posted in criminal law, Superman	John Carter
Posted in contracts, estate law, movies	The Hunger Games and Other Dangerous Sports
Posted on March 16, 2012 by James Daily | 43 comments
The Hunger Games is a trilogy of books, the first of which is also called The Hunger Games and which has been adapted into a film that debuts next week. It looks like it’s going to be both a good movie and feature more accurate archery than The Avengers, but I digress. The books are set in a future dystopian society in which teenagers, selected more or less at random, are forced to compete to the death in the titular Hunger Games.
Since the book takes place in a fundamentally different world than the real one, we can’t really examine the Games on their own terms. We can say they would certainly be illegal in the real world (no surprises there), but it may be interesting to examine why, exactly. After that we’ll ponder just how dangerous a real-world version of the Games could be without obviously running afoul of the law.
Some very minor spoilers follow (nothing you wouldn’t know from the trailer, I think).
Most entrants to the Hunger Games are selected randomly, but it is possible to volunteer. That’s how the protagonist enters the Games, for example. The Games themselves take place in a large uninhabited area in which the competitors (called tributes) are given weapons and supplies and expected to kill each other. The people running the Games (the Gamemakers) have various carrot and stick mechanisms they use to goad the tributes into competing, and the more or less inevitable result is that a single victor emerges with everyone else dead. If a group of tributes refused to fight then the Gamemakers would likely kill all of them or all but one.
II. So Why Exactly is This Illegal?
Intuitively this seems like it should be illegal, and it would be in the real world. For starters, the Gamemakers’ actions are pretty clearly illegal: the involuntary competitors are essentially kidnapped and falsely imprisoned, then threatened with death if they don’t compete.
The voluntary competitors are pretty much just as bad, as they’re agreeing with the Gamemakers to try to kill other people, many of whom are there involuntarily. That’s conspiracy and either attempted or actual premeditated murder.
(Note: By “voluntary competitors” I mean both tributes like the protagonist who make a direct choice to compete as well as those tributes who enter their names into the tribute selection lottery multiple times in order to earn extra food for their families. Arguably both are voluntarily entering the Games, whereas the tributes whose names are entered the minimum required number of times could be said to be involuntary competitors.)
The involuntary competitors are only slightly better off. They aren’t guilty of conspiracy because they didn’t agree to compete, but they may still be guilty of attempted murder or murder because they can’t claim the defenses of duress or necessity, since neither is a defense to murder in most jurisdictions. They could avoid liability by only fighting in self-defense, however, but that would usually mean waiting until other tributes attacked them first, which isn’t typically a winning strategy.
Now wait a minute, you might say, what about consent? Doesn’t it matter that the voluntary competitors consented to compete in the games? The answer is no, not really, even if the minor competitors’ parents also consented. While a person can consent to an assault or battery (think of boxing, for example), one cannot consent to one’s own serious injury or death. See, e.g., State v. Mackrill, 345 Mont. 469, 476 (2008) (“it is against public policy to permit a person purposely or knowingly to cause serious bodily injury to another, even though that conduct and the resulting harm were consented to”).
Well, what about assumption of the risk? Aren’t the voluntary competitors assuming the risk that they will get hurt? The problem here is that assumption of the risk does not extend to intentional wrongdoing, only negligence and recklessness. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 496A (“A plaintiff who voluntarily assumes a risk of harm arising from the negligent or reckless conduct of the defendant cannot recover for such harm.”) (emphasis added).
Similarly, the exception made for the harm inherent in sporting events only applies to lawful sports, whereas the Games are predicated on kidnapping, conspiracy, and threats. See, e.g, Colo Rev Stats, § 18-1-505(2) (“When conduct is charged to constitute an offense because it causes or threatens bodily injury, consent to that conduct or to the infliction of that injury is a defense only if … the conduct and the injury are reasonably foreseeable hazards of joint participation in a lawful athletic contest or competitive sport.”).
That pretty much sums up why the Games would be both criminal and tortious, but what are the real-world limits for something like this?
III. So How Close Can We Get?
Clearly we’ll have to begin with consent, so we can toss out all of the involuntary competitors. Ideally we’d get informed written consent from both the competitors and their parents, together with explicit waivers of liability for the Gamemakers and other competitors. Of course, to be meaningful the consent must be ongoing, which means the competitors must be free to leave the game at any time.
An important part of the informed consent process is to ensure that the competitors and their parents are aware of the reasonably foreseeable hazards of the Games. This helps bring the Games within the exception for lawful sports: “When conduct is charged to constitute an offense because it causes or threatens bodily injury, consent to such conduct or to the infliction of such injury is a defense if: … (b) the conduct and the injury are reasonably foreseeable hazards of joint participation in a lawful athletic contest or competitive sport ….” Model Penal Code § 2.11(2) (emphasis added).
The Games themselves would have to be watered down from a fight to the death to something more like Mixed Martial Arts. While certainly a vigorous athletic contest, serious injuries are not inherent in MMA, and so consent and assumption of the risk will go a lot farther in eliminating both criminal and tort liability.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is necessarily off the hook. Competitors and Gamemakers could still be liable for injuries that result from, for example, breaking the rules of the game that are concerned with safety. See, e.g., Nabozny v. Barnhill, 31 Ill. App. 3d 212 (1st Dist. 1975). With children involved the Games would likely need to either take advantage of sovereign immunity or have a hefty insurance contract.
So after all that, what are we left with? Basically a kind of free-form outdoor MMA, which the competitors can quit at any time. Not quite as exciting as a forced fight to the death in the wilderness, we’ll admit. What can we say? Lawyers spoil all the fun.
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Posted in criminal law, movies, torts	Good Day Sacramento
Posted in interviews and podcasts	My Cousin Vinny: The Perils of Joint Representation
Posted in criminal law, criminal procedure, legal ethics, movies	My Cousin Vinny’s 20th Anniversary
Posted in movies	Justice
But the series also includes a handful of things, largely tangential to the main story, which bear some legal analysis. We’ll take a look a those here. There are some spoilers inside. Continue reading →
Posted in criminal law	← Older posts