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THE LAW IS A ASS for 11/19/2002
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 171
Originally written as installment # 153 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 785, December 2, 1988 issue
What can I tell you? Sometimes I needed a change of pace in how I presented the information I wanted to discuss in a column. Hence the occasional column like the one below. They're my wife's favorite kind of column and I think they often turn out funnier, too.
It's especially good for subjects like today, contract law. Maximum jokes out of something that's about as funny Carrot Top telling bald jokes. (And jokes a lot funnier than that last quip. Promise.)
******
THE LAW IS A ASS
Installment # 171
by
BOB INGERSOLL
The waiting room outside the "Law Is a Ass" Co. LPA office looked like a pitchers' duel between Zeus and Jove. Everywhere I glanced there were lightening bolts. The Flash wanted a consult on credit management and landlord tenant problems. Captain Marvel--the DC one--had a 2:30 appointment for advice on how to get the Department of Health to release his records--he had this idea that he had a twin sister and a few distant cousins out there somewhere that he had lost track of and he wanted to invite them over for Christmas dinner. Black Lightening wanted to sue Lightening Lad and Lightening Lass for trademark infringement, because, as he put it, they may have been created first, his stories "take place a thousand years before theirs." But presently, my client was Zachery Palezogt, A.K.A. Zot.
"Mr. Ingersoll, what do you know about contract law?" Zot asked obviously hoping to hear that I had taught Charles Kingsfield everything he knew.
"Contracts?" I cast my mind back across more years than pass between issues of Ms. Mystic. I took my first, and only, contract course in law school ten years ago. I got a C+. And I had to cheat to get that good a grade. I told Zot as much.
His face looked like he had been told him he had just been exposed to cosmic radiation for the second time, and he was contemplating living life as an orange memo spike.
Zot got up to leave. I took a lucky stab. "I take it you've got a contract problem?" It's a little game we lawyers play, guessing the client's problem from subtle contextual clues. It makes us look omniscient and makes the client think we care about something other than the maturity date of our T-bills; even though we aren't and we don't.
It worked. Zot sat back down, which is fortunate, because if he hadn't this would have been a real short column.
"Why don't you tell me about your problem? After all, it can't be too complex; you only had twenty-four pages of story to create it. Less than that, if you had a fight scene or any of that filler stuff like characterization."
"It's a little more complex than that," Zot explained. "It's a two-part story. You see, recently I signed a contract to be the spokesperson for Bingo Pop."
"Watch it," I admonished. "No American Flagg jokes. It's been a sore spot ever since he took his business to Cochran."
"Sorry."
"Don't worry about it, you didn't know. Anyway, why did you agree to shlep Bingo Pop?"
"It's a good product I believe in. I think it's important for the kids to see advertisements for good wholesome products that don't make them hyperactive and don't promote tooth decay."
"In other words, the money?"
"Right. Max Headroom hawks Coke, I figured why not me?
"Well, it turns out that the whole contract was a fix arranged by my old enemy, The Blotch."
"The Blotch?"
"Is it my fault that Marvel and DC had taken all the good names, before I started?"
"The Blotch? I'm trying to place a face with the name."
"You can't. He sort of doesn't have a face. He's a tall guy, crime boss, dresses like Edward G. Robinson. His face looks like Silly Putty after it's been run through the washing machine?"
"Anyway, he just bought his way out of prison and he bought Bingo Pop. Then he tricked me into signing an endorsement contract for Bingo Pop."
"Tricked you?" I perked up. Already my keen legal mind ran through those few defenses I still remembered from my decade old contracts class, like fraud in the inducement. "How?"
"He had Bingo Pop offer me so much money, I signed it so fast, I didn't bother to read the fine print." Oh well, so much for that idea.
"Go on, Zot. So far you're getting mega-bucks to promote carbonated sugar water, what's the problem?"
"There was a clause in the contract that says I couldn't do anything that would cause the Bingo Pop company to be discredited or damaged in anyway--either the company or its officers. Seeing as how Blotch was an officer of the company, I couldn't arrest him without breaching my contract."
"Didn't I see something like that on RoboCop?"
"No. RoboCop was programmed with that prohibition. I've got a contract problem."
I chastised myself mentally. How couldI have failed to see such a fundamental difference. "So you want me to figure out a way for you to get out from under the contract?
"Uh, no. All that happened in Zot! # 22. In Zot! # 23 I kind of got mad at him and arrested him anyway."
"Didn't he accuse you of breaching your contract?"
"Yes."
"So?"
"So?"
"Sooo?"
"So I said, 'So sue me!!'"
"So?"
"So he sued me."
"So, you're looking for defenses?" I cast my mind back again trying to remember defenses. I knew they taught it somewhere in Contracts. I thought it was between anticipatory breach and how to write binding contracts that only your side doesn't have to honor. I remembered that minor's can't legally sign contracts, so I asked, "Zot, how old are you?"
"How old am I?"
"How old are you?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"No. I don't know."
"Can we stop the Moonlighting scthicks and get serious? How can you not know how old you are?"
"When Zot! started, I was a teenager. But that was four years ago, and I don't know whether the Eclipse universe operates under real time or under that protracted comic book time. I could be sixteen or I could be twenty-something. Besides, I was on hiatus for one and one-half years and I don't know whether I aged or not during that time."
I wondered if it was too late to call in Mage, so we could discuss his problems in getting liability insurance. "Well, we'll look into that one more fully later. Let's see if we can figure out a solution that doesn't require a masters degree in the omniversal theory of temporal progression.
"Do you happen to know if contract law in your dimension works like contract law in my universe?"
"No. Why?"
I should have guessed it was going to be one of those days when I woke up and found medical waste washed up in my water bed. "In my universe, you can't sign a contract to do something which is either against the law or against public policy."
"What's a public policy?"
Or if not the water bed, I really should have known when my scrambled eggs hatched an extinct, and extremely destructive, creature. "Something which would be very harmful to the general public good.
"You see, a contract which prevents you from arresting criminals engaged in crimes would be harmful to the general public good. Such a contract is against public policy and not legally enforceable. If the contract's against public policy, Blotch couldn't enforce it."
"It's a possibility, Mr. Ingersoll, but like I said, I don't know if contract law in my universe works like contract law in your universe."
I decided to forget that idea for the time being. If I was going to represent Zot, I didn't want to have to take another three years of law school, not to mention another bar exam, in some other dimension to do it.
"How about this," I suggested, "Your contract prevents you from doing anything which would discredit or damage Bingo Pop, right?"
"Yes."
At last, a question he could answer. "Well, Bingo Pop is an old established and reputable business. Won't it's reputation be discredited or damaged, if its officers engage in criminal conduct? In that case, wouldn't you be causing the company to be discredited and damaged, by doing nothing and letting the officers engage in blatant criminal conduct? In other words, you didn't breach your contract by arresting Blotch, you were just living up to the condition of not discrediting the company.
"And I would have been breaching the contract by not arresting Blotch?"
"Right. I know it's technical, but it might work."
"But, Mr. Ingersoll, that idea will only work if a company is discredited or damaged when its officers engage in criminal conduct. Are the reputations of companies in your dimension damaged, when the officers engage in criminal conduct?"
I had to admit, he had me on a technicality. I had only one more suggestion. I was stumped. I couldn't think of any defense for Zot. I was about to send him out despondent--which in legal terms means, my lawyer couldn't help me but I have to pay him anyway--when suddenly I remembered the NFL Gambit."
"The NFL Gambit?" Zot asked, "What's that?"
"That's where you openly breach the contract, while at the same time you tell your bosses that you aren't going to perform, until they renegotiate with you for more money."
"Is that legal?"
"Of course it is. It works for football players all the time."
Zot left. Quicksilver ran in just before Captain Marvel could enter. I have to talk to Chris Claremont; just because the mutants are Number One is no reason to let them get pushy.
"Ingersoll," he panted, "You gotta help me. I just got clocked doing sixty-five in a school zone. Do you know how I can fix a traffic ticket?"
If the water bed or the eggs didn't tell me, I really should have known when all my VHS tapes turned into Beta.
Bob Ingersoll
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