Who pays the bill for rebuilding after a fight with a supervillain? Is the evidence Batman gathers legal to use by prosecution? Are Wolverine’s claws protected by the second amendment? Does Superman need to carry a work visa or resident alien (pun intended) card?
If you’re like me, you have spent many a hours pondering things like these. As fan boys & girls, we often like to run a fine toothcomb through our favorite comics and cbms. Heck, I’ve seen comment threads as long as the Bifrost Bridge.
Well that is where lawyers James Daily and Ryan Davidson come in. The two operate a site called Law and the Muliverse. The blog is dedicated to answer comic book law related questions with the real laws of the land as reference.
Here is an example:
Doomsday throws Superman into a person’s home. The owner of said house has homeowners insurance. The insurance agency sends a claims agent to assess the damage, and to see if it is covered by the policy. First of all, insurance policies are only written for insurable risk. An insurable risk is one where both the probability and magnitude of a particular kind of loss are measurable, where the occurrence of that loss is truly random, and where it is possible to transfer that risk to an insurer for an economically-feasible premium.
Example of insurable risks is fires. The way to find out the risk, is by taking into account the number of fires in a given zip code, the value of the home in question, and the frequency of house fires in the area (how often fires happen). The insurance agency can insure against fire with a premium that is profitable to them and expectable to the policyholder. Floods are an example of uninsurable risk, in that they are considered “catastrophic” losses, because they cause both a high amount of damage to individual properties but also a high amount of damage to entire regions, making it impossible to adequately spread the cost to other property owners.
So the claims adjuster takes a look at the policy. The home is insured for $100,000. Then he/she will look at the insuring agreement. This policy is a special perils form, which covers everything not specifically excluded. Then check if the policyholder is up to date on their premium, gave timely notice of the claim, and is cooperating with the adjuster. So far so good.
But the homeowner forgot to buy terrorism insurance.
To say that Doomsday is a terrorist is not a huge strech of the imanganation. Even if he is’nt, it wouldn’t be difficult to fit him into the war or civil unrest exemptions that is a part of every insurance policy. What does that mean for the homeowner?
It means your policy doesn't cover the damage.
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So when you get a chance hit, the link and check out the site.
Bishop "Gopher" Harcourt