10 Legal Problems Superheroes Don't Like To Talk About

Nearly every major DC Golden Age or Silver Age superhero had a teen - or even pre-teen - sidekick. The Teen Titans were a whole team of adolescent versions of the Justice League.

If the kid’s simply sneaking out of the house to play capes and robbers, that’s one thing… but when you’ve actively taken a hand in training and equipping your ward to stay out all night attacking armed criminals, you’ll be prey to all kinds of allegations of endangerment and/or criminal negligence. Let’s not forget that ‘ward’ is short for ‘ward of the court’.

Minors are afforded all sorts of legal protection, and they don’t have to suffer an injury for you to be liable: it’s the likelihood of their suffering an injury that causes the legal snafus. Any other adults - especially law enforcement officials - that are aware of the situation are complicit: Commissioner Gordon is in as much trouble as Batman for allowing Robin to get shot at, even if Robin never actually gets shot - and even being seen swinging around the rooftops of Gotham is grounds for investigation by child protection services.

Minors also don’t have the same allowances in law as adults. All those issues raised about secret identities before? Even more of a problem for kids, as very often they’re simply not legally entitled to obtain the necessary documentation and don’t have legal access to funds.

Then there comes the question of legal liability for illegal activities undertaken by a child sidekick. Vigilantism is a subject I’ve covered in a little detail, but what about the adult’s vicarious liability for the actions of a child trained to peak human levels of physicality? Not every Robin has exactly been mentally stable - what if he’d beaten a criminal to death, something all of the boys who’ve worked with Batman are fully capable of? Damian Wayne was raised by the League Of Assassins - he's assumed to have killed plenty of people before becoming Robin, and has certainly killed after.

And then there are those children who have powers even greater. Invincible’s half brother Oliver - aka Kid Omni-Man - has Superboy levels of speed and strength, but isn’t in any sense a human being. Not being able to relate to humans, and having a skewed sense of the value of human life due to the nine-month lifespan of his mother’s race, he murders supervillain duo the Mauler Twins to prevent them reoffending, something which appalls his big brother, who was supposed to be training him.

Franklin Richards, on the other hand, is often referred to as the most powerful human being in the Marvel Universe: omnipotent, able to change all of reality with a thought, if little Franklin was to go off the rails then there’d be literally no point in suing anyone, because it’s likely that everyone would be dead… until he decided they weren’t...