Versus the Wild Turkey

One of the great things about admiralty law is reading the names people give their boats. The “Wild Turkey” is my favorite so far.

Another benefit is the frequent telling of sea stories. My professor was in the Navy and has practiced maritime law for a long time, so he has some good ones about the crazy things that happen in the navigable waters of the Unites States. His stories are frequently accompanied by illustrations – rough sketches on the board of some harbor or another. He is fond of introducing them by saying something like, “Of course, you all recognize this as the San Juan, Puerto Rico harbor because of the palm trees I’ve drawn on the peninsula.”

One of the first considerations in admiralty law is whether the case involves a “vessel.” An object doesn’t become a vessel just by being able to float (a floating log is probably not a vessel; a yacht probably is). For example, does an inflatable bubble designed to work like a human hamster wheel and allow someone to run on water count as a vessel? (My professor terms this device an “aquabubble.” Reza Baluchi used one in an attempt to run the Bermuda triangle, but was picked up by the Coast Guard somewhere in the middle of his course.)

One of the other fun things about admiralty law is you can sue a vessel and have it arrested, as if it were a person. (My professor jocularly termed the arrest a “habeus grabbus.”) That’s how you end up with a court case called So-and-So versus the Wild Turkey. It’s a little bit of a strange notion, but has a long history (longer, indeed, than the existence of the United States).

Another strange notion came up as I was reading part of Justinian’s Institutes (one of the oldest written law texts in the western world). A provision was included for ownership rights related to pursuing a swarm of bees. The idea, of course, is to hive them and harvest their honey; but I don’t know that I’d have the gumption to pursue my bee swarm if it decided to move on to greener pastures.

The wacky stories continued in Copyright, where we read a case involving a photograph of a man holding his daughter on his shoulders (taken for a local newspaper). Federal Law enforcement became very interested in the photo because, as it turned out, the man was impersonating a Rockefeller and had abducted his daughter (there was a custody battle going on). As my professor put it, the story “not surprisingly became a made-for-TV movie” and a copyright battle ensued over whether the photo that was created for the movie infringed the original copyright.

And then there was the Supreme Court doctrine we studied in First Amendment this week. I won’t try to explain it, but my professor described it best when he said, “It’s mind blowing on so many levels.”

Come to think of it, that comment applies to a lot of what I’ve learned in law school.