Olantern

For a series that's supposedly about a "guy with no superpowers" facing comparatively "realistic" villains, Batman sures features a lot of quasi-gods.

Speaking of Batman, may I suggest Kite-Man as one of the worst villains in history?

The AD&D settings not only aren't located in the Milky Way galaxy; they're located in a universe in which galaxies don't even exist.

As EisenRegen and others imply, the AD&D multiverse (specifically as described in the early '90's Spelljammer products and related material) has a somewhat consistent set of physical laws regarding objects in space, but those laws bear almost no relationship to those of the real world.

In this setting, earthlike worlds such as you're describing exist on the Prime Material Plane, which consists of an infinite, bottomless, surfaceless ocean of a flammable meta-element called "phlogiston" (a term lifted from some early models that attempted to explain real-world thermodynamics). Within this phlogiston, immense, round spheres known as "crystal spheres" (a concept lifted from some medieval ideas about the structure of the universe) exist. Inside most of these spheres is a vacuum of space in which various bodies called "planets" orbit a central body.

AD&D celestial bodies, rather than being characterized as stars, terrestrial planets, Jovian planets, and so on, are described by their elemental nature (earth, fire, etc.) and size (on a scale ranging from A to J). A fire body, particularly of size J or larger, is generally referred to as a "sun," and many crystal spheres, including the one containing the planet Toril, have a sun at their center. Earth bodies are usually habitable worlds much like our earth, including atmospheres. (Worlds without breathable air are rare and are known as "voidworlds.")

So far, these planets aren't all that different from ones that might exist in the real universe, though the categories used to describe them are different (most gases are undifferentiated, breathable "air" rather than the mixtures of different, recognized elements that make up real-world air, etc.). Where this setting really differs wildly from reality is in the way gravity works. In the real universe, the gravity an object generates depends on its mass, so that large bodies have high gravity and small bodies have low gravity. Further, gravity varies with the square of the distance between objects.

In the AD&D worlds, gravity is constant. All objects, regardless of size, generate the same force of gravity. Where a person might weigh 150 pounds on the (massive) real earth and only a fraction of that while on a (low-mass) spacecraft in space, in the AD&D setting, the person weighs 150 pounds no matter where he is. Further, rather than collapsing objects over a certain mass to a spherical shape, as in the real world, AD&D gravity conforms to the shape of objects. A sphere's gravity pulls toward a point at the center of the sphere, but the gravity of a galleon-shaped ship in space exists in a plane running parallel to the deck, so that a person can stand normally on the deck while in space. (The gravity plane is two-sided, so a person could also walk along the bottom of the ship.)

All of this explains how even a body of the same density as the real earth but much larger could exert the same gravity in an AD&D setting as real-world earth gravity. It's because that setting's gravity simply Works That Way. This isn't very realistic, but at least it's relatively consistent within its own milieu.

Okay, I'm embarassed that I wrote all that purely from memory. Man, did I ever waste my high school years. I'll stop now ....

This is incorrect; it is an "urban legend" of comics fandom. However, the reasoning behind it is sort of correct.

In broad terms, insufficiently distinctive marks (images, phrases, what-have-you) cannot be successfully protected by trademark. If someone challenges such a mark in court, the court is likely to find the trademark invalid (and unregisterable, if it's a registered trademark). This is the reasoning behind the legend, and this reasoning is more or less legally correct. That is, DC or its parent couldn't defend a trademark of "an image of a bat."

However, the black Batman emblem that was used before the yellow oval was introduced is not just "an image of a bat." It's stylized and quite distinctive. The oval-less emblem could almost certainly be successfully protected by trademark, just as the one with the oval could.

Turning from law to fact, Julius Schwartz, editor of the Batman comics at the time the yellow oval was first adopted, repeatedly stated that it had nothing to do with trademark protection or lack thereof. Rather, the introduction of the oval was meant to create a "new look" for Batman, in much the same way that Schwartz had ushered in new versions of Green Lantern, the Flash, and the Atom a few years earlier. That is, it was what we'd call these days a "rebranding" to make Batman look more like the other DC heroes of the day.

Note: The discussion of trademark law above is taken from both my own understanding of trademark law (this is not my area of practice, so don't consider this post legal advice) and the discussion of this comic book legend in Was Superman a Spy? by Brian Cronin (Plume Books, 2009), pages 40-41. (Cronin is also an attorney as well as a blogger on the subject of comic book urban legends.) The discussion of Schwartz's reasoning is taken from Cronin's book.

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Personally, I don't particularly like the new design, but I've just never been a fan of Batman's costume, period. I've always disliked the use of grey; it gives the impression that he either can't keep the costume clean or can't afford to have it dyed an appropriate color.

Iron Man, possibly?

You're at least partially right about police access to portions of the city Wayne owns, though police would be able to enter with a warrant or in a situation where an exception to the warrant applies (and there are a lot of those situations). For property owned by the Wayne Corporation rather than Bruce Wayne personally, whether he could do so would depend on whether Wayne could act as a legal "agent" of the corporation. (Since he's usually characterized as some kind of corporate officer, I'd argue that he could act on the corporation's behalf.)

With regard to using deadly force, you're confusing the concept of trespassing with what's really a form of self-defense, which is a separate legal issue. Even if a villain trespasses on Wayne Corporation property, that doesn't necessarily mean the property's owner can use deadly force (or any kind of force) against him.

In general, the only situation where where deadly force could be excused would be in a case of self-defense. Self-defense, like insanity, is an affirmative defense to a crime, in this case, murder. That is, if person who used deadly force is charged with murder, even if the state meets its burden of proving he killed the victim (the villain, in our scenario), the person cannot be convicted if he can prove he had an objectively reasonable belief that he must use deadly force to defend himself or another person (but not to defend property).

This can interact with property rights and trespassing because some jurisdictions have a judicial or statutory addition to the doctrine of self-defense called the "castle doctrine." This varies in form, but some formulations state that use of force is presumed to be self-defense if the person used it while in his home (but not other property). This wouldn't apply in the Bruce Wayne scenario unless the villain attacked stately Wayne Manor.

This seems unlikely, but I haven't read anything about the DC heroes operating or being recognized as a government of their own.

Even if they do, it doesn't seem like a winning argument for the Joker. To use an analogy, if an official of the U.S.S.R. visited the United States in 1960 and was killed there by an American, the American could be prosecuted for the murder under American law and could not escape conviction simply by arguing that the Soviet was an agent of a hostile, foreign power. All that said, I've seen real cases in which mentally unsteady people have argued things like this (often claiming that the U.S. government is illegitimate in one way or another), so though it doesn't sound like it stands much chance of success, it would certainly be realistic for the Joker to argue this.

As for diplomatic immunity, since I know next to nothing about international law, I'll content myself with saying that I'm fairly sure it wouldn't allow Batman to avoid criminal charges for the sorts of things he does. Turning the example above around, if the Soviet diplomat kills an American, I'm fairly certain the U.S. would attempt to try him for murder under American law, even if he could claim diplomatic immunity, which I doubt he could.

In any case, diplomatic immunity in comics, like so many other aspects of law in comics, doesn't necessarily work the way it does in the real world. For instance, in some Fantastic Four stories, it's little more than a plot device to enable Dr. Doom to return issue after issue because he's a foreign ruler.

That's the most important point this discussion brings up: all that I've posted so far assumes that American law in the DC Universe is fairly similar to American law in the real world. There's no guarantee that that's so.

You've got it backward. Under American law, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees them due process rights before being deprived of their liberty by being involuntarily committed. People who may be committed can't be "checked in by anyone" precisely because they lose pretty much all rights once committed.

Instead, in order to be committed to an institution involuntarily, someone must initiate a court proceeding for commitment. In a situation like the Joker's, as I implied in my last post, that would be the state, represented by a subdivision of the District Attorney's office that handles such cases exclusively. In other cases, it might be a relative who cannot care for the person the relative wants committed. (I believe the state will still present the case for commitment even if it's being urged by a private party, but I'm not certain. This is fairly far outside my area of expertise.) The person threatened with commitment will present the case against it.

I'm not too familiar with the legal standard applied in these cases, though I believe that you're right that it's whether the person is a danger to himself or others. The party seeking commitment will be the burdened party in a case like this.

By the way, for a fairly realistic example of what how a case like this might be litigated, see the original (1948) version of Miracle on 34th Street. Note how in that case, an Assitant D.A. is one arguing commitment, and the case is styled State v. Kringle.

You might be surprised. In many places, attorneys (and sometimes law students acting under attorney supervision) provide pro bono representation to individuals under threat of commitment as part of programs administered by the courts. In other places, I believe these cases are handled by public defender's offices. The person who may be committed can hire a private attorney if he has the funds available. And, of course, the person can always choose to represent himself.

Given that the Joker's pockets contain only "knives and lint," according to The Dark Knight, he probably receives pro bono representation through either a public defender's office or an attorney assigned by the court. Judging from what I know of regular, criminal cases involving infamous defendants, the court probably appoints his representative with extraordinary care, seeking someone with a great deal of expertise, either a very experienced litigator who has handled many commitment cases or a law professor specializing in the law of commitment (and probably criminal law as well).

Of course, the Joker isn't noted for sensible decisions, so he might chose to represent himself, which is likely to result in a pretty short hearing.

I could've sworn I have seen exactly this, especially the second part. That is, I think I've seen Batman dressing down police officers who've killed in self-defense. I'm certain that I've seen him (or his author, which amounts to the same thing, to me) criticizing other characters for failing to save characters from "third-party" causes of death, such as burning buildings or falls.

Edit: Forgot the whole reason I posted again. BlueBattler asked whether the Joker would be considered "insane" in a legal sense. Whether the Joker could successfully argue that he wasn't guilty of a crime by reason of insanity (or any of the corresponding formulations of the insanity defense found in various jurisdictions) depends on a number of factors; there's no yes-or-no answer.

One critical factor is what the jurisdiction's standard for establishing insanity is. It's been over a decade since I studied Criminal Law, but I recall enough to know that standards vary wildly. They range from inability to appreciate the wrongfulness of conduct (doubtful, given what I've seen posted about him in this thread) to whether a mental disease or defect can be established to whether the defendant has "diminished capacity" to have the necessary mental state to be charged with a crime to a variety of other standards. Since we don't know much about Gotham City's jurisprudence, it's difficult to say anything with much certainty. Note that that's "mental disease or defect" or "inability to appreciate wrongfulness" in the eyes of law, not in the psychological sense. A defendant might very well be medically "sane" yet legally "insane" or vice versa, depending on how the jurisdiction's cases have interpreted the standards and how much weight, if any, its courts give to psychiatric testimony. It's worth mentioning that in spite of how often insanity is mentioned in fiction about criminal trials, it's rarely raised in practice and even then is rarely established successfully.

The second important factor in determining this issue is the factual circumstances of the specific crime with which the Joker is charged. As with other affirmative defenses in the law, insanity isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. A defendant might be able to establish the defense successfully on one count (crime) but not another.

The important thing to take away from this is that whether the Joker is legally insane is only tangentially related to whether he has a mental defect as described in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and even less related to whether he's "crazy" in the eyes of his author or us as readers.

Of course, that doesn't answer the question. For what it's worth, back when I was taking first year law classes like Criminal Law, I was watching The New Batman/Superman Adventures every day, and I'd often assess the legal consequences of the situations in the shows as a way of reviewing the material.* I remember thinking when studying the M'Naghten rule and other aspects of insanity that it would be impossible for most of Batman's foes to establish insanity defenses, though I can't recall why now.

If I were stuck defending the Joker after he'd been thwarted by Batman (well, someone presumably does it), I'd probably argue that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated at some stage of Batman's investigation. Batman is arguably an agent of law enforcement, in fact if not in name, and he certainly doesn't go around obtaining warrants for his searches or looking for exceptions to the requirement for obtaining one. This kind of determination would be made long before the stage of presenting an insanity defense, and I believe there's a fair chance it would succeed, which would get the case "thrown out" relatively early in its potential life. This suggests that even in the DC Universe's courts, the issue of the Joker's legal insanity may never have come up. (Oh, and if I got stuck defending the Joker, even if he was ultimately convicted, he could probably establish a good habeas corpus claim for postconviction relief based on ineffective assistance of counsel, since criminal law is most definitely not my field of practice.)

As an aside, I've always assumed, without much evidence, that Batman's foes are locked up in Arkham because of post-arrest civil commitment proceedings, not because of any crimes of which they may have been accused or convicted. That is, a villain gets captured, the Gotham D.A.'s office determines whether to charge him with anything, and meanwhile, apart from that, a different division of the D.A.'s office brings a proceeding to have the villain sent to Arkham because he's a danger or himself or others, totally apart from anything he may have already done. This brings in a completely different set of standards (civil commitment vs. criminal insanity) that lies both beyond the scope of this post and beyond my knowledge, aside from what I've posted already.

* Further aside: I do clearly remember being certain that the Joker could be considered to have proximately caused damages inflicted by Batman during a car chase for purposes of a civil damage suit. This doesn't mean the Joker would automatically have to pay damages. It just means someone could sue him over Batman's, say, running over a bystander's foot. Of course, successfully collecting damages from the Joker would be a battle in itself. Imagine how the Clown Prince of Crime would react to being sued, let alone losing! I think this would make an interesting premise for an episode of one of the Batman cartoons, don't you?

For more on the law and superheroes, consider the opening sequences of The Incredibles, which shows an example of plaintiffs who attempt to use the tort doctrine of negligent rescue, and the fascinating section "The History of Metahuman Law in the United States of America" in the RPG Silver Age Sentinels, which deals with such issues as whether a hero can testify while masked and who has jurisdiction over crimes committed with superpowers (and was also written in part by Jesse Scoble, a.k.a. Arctic Sun, formerly of these fora).

Fixed for thoroughness/application to me. From this subforum, I learned that everything geeky is Serious Business. From the fora in general, I learned that a game I still like is apparently a Slap In The Face to everyone else who posts here. Oh, well.

Notes:

1) I like Signs; I think it does fairly well despite its utterly idiotic plotholes (pointed out in this thread).

2) Slap In The Face is i18's new meme. Use it at home, in the car, or on the boat; wherever good times are had!

It does appear to have been taken in the costume creator, but I believe it's a PC costume piece (Hats--> Resistance).

Is the treatment of magic, dare I say, a Slap In The Face? (This is my new meme for i18; please spread it around.)

I suspect that one reason we're getting such an emphasis on everything except magic in a new setting is that people have been whining for several issues now about how there's "too much magical stuff," how "that Origin of Power thing made all origins Magic," and how "magic isn't a superhero thing." I don't really agree with that, but it's undeniable that there's plenty of magic stuff in the game as a whole. I don't expect everything introduced to revolve around it.

For what it's worth, I am not one of those anti-Magic Origin people. Magic is my favorite origin, and I'll be making more magical characters for the Praetorian content.

You have a very different conception of Batman from the one comics, movies, and books (the novelization of Knightfall) have given me. Some heroes are law-and-order types, but not Batman; he's always presented as serving a "higher" moral code, which more or less amounts to "no one should ever be killed." As he's been presented to me, Batman would refuse to hand over anyone to the authorities if there was the slightest possibility that person might end up executed, simply because the entire point of Batman and his stories is that Killing Is Always Wrong, No Matter What The Circumstance, Even If It's An Accident, Let Alone Intentional. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see a story about Batman breaking a supervillain out of a death row-type situation. Does anyone know if there's ever been a story like that?

As you might guess from the tone of the preceding paragraph, I don't much care for the character of Batman.

That said, blaming him for another character's misdeeds is even sillier than his own preachiness.

In my opinion, it just isn't his fault. Everyone draws this line in a different place. A psychologist who studies legal systems once noted that while science is deterministic (his example was a psychologist recognizing other people's behavior as affecting a defendant's actions), law emphasizes the free will and responsiblity of individual actors. As much as I like to criticize legal philosophy, I think this is one point where it got things right. Your Mileage May (Will) Vary.

I know not what others have seen, but I saw this as long ago as my first week of play and as recently as a week ago. The Lost are, uh, hard to find.

I just can't understand this jaded attitude. That's probably partly because I don't like loot, am perfectly happy with either side of the game, and want a break from playing my 50's, but why do I seem to be the only one like this? How did the player base suddenly shift to be focused so intently on end game content when it seemed to be of only moderate interest to so many people up until about a month ago?

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Anyway, I'm about as excited as I ever get over this kind of thing, but I'm even happier to see someone else is excited. Reading the boards and listening in in-game, player morale seems to be at an all-time low. You'd think the game was being shut down next week, not having its first expansion in years released.

The music had a very Dark Knight feel, which I'm sure was the intent.

I liked the flybys as well, though I think the staccato jerking of the zooms was a stylistic mistake. Half the comments I saw on the video were complaints that "even the company that made it can't get it to run smoothly." Sigh.