As mentioned in this thread, I’m working on a story about a super-powered character who refuses to call himself a superhero. He basically has Kryptonian powers, but he declines to use them in any systematic way; he’d catch a falling airliner if he happened to see it falling, but he doesn’t go on patrol, wear a costume, or anything else like that.
I’m thinking that, per Oakminster’s suggestion in the original thread, the character is currently being sued. I’m toying with two possibilities for the suit:
The character lives on an inaccessible mountaintop in a house he built himself. The mountain’s on government land, and he leases only the peak; there are no roads up the mountain. A family of tourists happened to be vacationing nearby, and their teenage daughter, while trying to sneak onto his leased property, got mauled by a bear. The family is now suing him for maintaining an attractive nuisance.
While out to dinner with friends, the character had his super-hearing in “off” mode. (He almost always keeps it off for reasons left as an exercise for the class.) Thus he did not hear the frantic cries for his help from a man being mugged a few streets over and is being sued for negligence or some such.
In either case, does Not!Superman have any genuine (as opposed to nuisance) legal liability?
They taught as this in my first aid class. As a regular Joe Schmoe, I do not have a duty to perform first aid and I don’t have to if I don’t want to. If I was a paramedic, wearing my uniform and sitting in my ambulance waiting for dispatch to send me someplace and someone had a heart attack right in front of me, then I would be negligent if I just said “Tough noogies” and refused to perform my duty.
What if the plaintiff is arguing, in this case, that the fact that Not!Superman does stop crimes when it suits him (i.e., when he’s not surfing the web, chatting up supermodels, or reading Pratchett), and has answered overheard calls for help before, he has implicitly taken on the duty to do so?
Not sure about the legal liabilities, but for the lawsuit how about being sued by the railroad for stopping a train. He was just passing by, saw the bus about to get smashed by the train and stops the train, superman style. Those locomotives aren’t cheap. There could be injuries to the crew, and if it’s a passenger train then you know there’s going to be lawsuits.
I don’t think so, but I would like to see a knowledgeable answer too.
As a regular Joe Schmoe, if I perform CPR once, it doesn’t mean I’m duty-bound to do it again, but if Not!Supes does habitually save lives, he could be establishing some kind of expectation.
You’re the author, you can make the law whatever you want. But in real life, no. Affirmative duties typically come in a few specified ways – 1) You’re the guy who put them in danger in the first place. 2) You’re getting paid to protect, educate, or in some other way look after them such that it’s reasonable for them to rely on you. Uh, I think that’s it. Now if the guy accepted some sort of deputization, that’s a different matter, but it doesn’t sound like your character is the type of guy who’d go for that.
If treated “realistically” I think it would be more interesting to describe how a non-crime fighting person with superpowers would make a living and get by day to day. Sex might be out as super-powered orgasms would be dangerous. Would they kill for hire, deliver satellites into orbit, destroy old buildings for renovation projects? What could they possibly wear that would stand up to superheated air friction?
The comic book "Supreme Power" a few years ago had a fairly realistic take (IMO) ion how the government might handle a super powered child that fell into their hands.
I think creating a story line around a superhero in which the law applies identically to our laws today, is just not possible. Liability is everywhere and the cause/effect of these superhero feats would be so gigantic that law suits would be a daily situation.
Who cleans up the spider webs Spiderman leaves behind? If superman (recent movie) lands a plan in a baseball field, who pays to have the grounds fixed? The plane would have gone into space had he not gotten involved. Why doesn’t Superman get sued for leaving his crystals unattended and out there for any moron willing to find his hideout to take? All the public and private property that Batman destroys in his quest to rid injustice of the city - somebody has to pay for it - someone is inconvenienced (fine, Bruce Wayne is rich, he can pay for it - but then he would be outing himself somewhat).
To have a superhero story, you kind of have to rid yourself of lawsuit liability. Otherwise, you are in essence creating an outlaw who hasn’t been deputized, isn’t regulated by anyone, and who always is fumbling the law.
Have a third party be injured due to his attempt at saving someone. The third party can sue him over that.
The mountain top house is not an attractive nuisance for reasons already given. Even if it were, the mauling by the bear would be an unforeseen, intervening superceding cause, and the guy isn’t maintaining the bear. Unless, as someone else said, you want to make it the guy’s pet bear, in which case you might have a case but it wouldn’t have anything to do with his Superness or his UnSuperness.
Generally, people do not have a duty to rescue. If you try, you have a duty to do so in a non-negligent fashion – you can’t hurt person B in your attempt to help person A – but you don’t have to even make an attempt. And prior attempts or successes at rescue do not impose a future duty to continue to rescue. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to.
But I think this is a very interesting idea: At what point is a superhero nothing more than a vigilante? On what basis does he or she flout the law? Granted, it’s the opposite of the OP’er’s hypothetical – not “does he have to be super?” but “why can he be super?” and/or “is he really all that super?” – but interesting nonetheless.
Well, Clark’s a mensch. I’m sure he went back and moved it later. But there was no point in hanging around while the passengers were evacuated, and he had to get back to work. The baseball game was already ruined by his mere presence anyway.