1. Mediaite
  2. Gossip Cop
  3. Geekosystem
  4. Styleite
  5. SportsGrid
  6. The Mary Sue
  7. The Jane Dough
  8. The Braiser

Mutatis Mutandis

Mutant Rights: That Time the (Real) Federal Government Ruled On Whether The X-Men Were Human

by Susana Polo | 11:44 am, December 27th

Share on Tumblr

In Marvel comics, members of world governments argue forcefully that the X-Men and mutantkind are far from human: so far that their civil liberties can and should be taken from them. But in the real world, at the beginning of this century, it was private lawyers that sought to classify the X-Men and a number of other Marvel characters as non-human, and the government who had assumed they were just normal people like everybody else. Why?

Those things your high school history teacher tried so desperately to stress the importance of: tariffs.

Sherry Singer and Indie Sing were the two international trade lawyers working for Marvel Comics in the ’90s (and they were ladies, we feel obligated to mention by the mandate of the site), who took a look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a book full of customs regulations, and realized that “dolls” were taxed 12% on import, while “toys” were taxed only 6.8%. The difference between the two was that a doll “represented only a human being,” while “toys” were ”monsters, robots, angels, basically anything that isn’t “only representing a human.” Probably, at some point in the past, some American doll manufacturer had felt threatened by overseas competition, and had lobbied the government to put a tax on imported dolls.

Naturally, all of the toys of their superheroic characters that Marvel imported from overseas manufacturing companies were considered to be representations of human beings, and therefore “dolls.” Singer and Sing saw a golden opportunity to save Marvel millions of dollars… if they could simply convince the US Court of International Trade that the X-Men weren’t human… and were therefore “toys.”

The court cases went on for a decade, eventually ending in 2003. We won’t give away the ending, so you’ll just have to listen to the place this story was recently retold: the latest twenty-minute Podcast short from RadioLab, embedded below. Law and the Multiverse would also like to add that the Harmonized Tariff Schedule has since consolidated the definitions of “toy” and “doll” into one, eliminating the tax difference between them.

TAGS: | | | |


  • http://profiles.google.com/amberlovescomics Elizabeth-Amber Delaney

    Fascinating look at the hidden behind-the-scenes cogs that make our comics. 

  • Anonymous

    Ok, but what I really want to know is…does this set any sort of usable legal precedent for future discrimination against humanoid mutants in our midst? I wish I wasn’t actually worried, but a part of me is actually worried!

  • Curtis Owings

    This type of discussion could be referenced in other court cases about obscenity (as a possible example).  As our advances in digital rendering continue will the definition of the X-Men as inhuman make rendered images exempt from decency standards?  If it is a “mutant” child will Hollywood be able to bend some rules around what they can show?  Or could they depict story-lines of gross racism, descrimination, and cruelty against “inhuman” characters?  The point being it shifts the concern from regulated standards to only what the market will accept.  Profit over morals.

  • http://amidstdancers.blogspot.com/ Shard Aerliss

    I think it does. It’s a legal definition and could, by some very clever lawyers be used in the way you (and I) fear.

  • Anonymous

    I can’t believe there has been a blog about superhero legal issues for a year and I’m just not finding out about it.  That’s amazeballs.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R6ODYVHCB23JAQC33NPS5RLUN4 Kifre

    That is…not a very well founded fear, I think.
    For one thing, rights are afforded to persons under the law, not humans.  If you remember the Citizens United case from 2 years ago, corporations are considered (some feel wrongly) to be legal persons and are therefore afforded rights. So the limitations entailed in the definition of ‘human isn’t dispositive of whether rights will be afforded.

    Anyway, human genes mutate all the time.  I think you’d be really hard pressed to convince a court – in a civil rights context – that a person with a noticable mutation is a new class of being rather than a human with a medical condition.

  • Anonymous

    The term “Action Figure” was coined to save Hasbro a small fortune. The very Tariff on dolls mentioned was going to cost Hasbro a pretty penny for the Gi Joe line. No problem – it wasn’t a doll, it was an Action Figure. (See William Lutz’ Doublespeak books for more detail)

  • Frodo Baggins

    “Or could they depict story-lines of gross racism, descrimination, and cruelty against “inhuman” characters?”

    How is this different than what Hollywood films do now? I’m not even being facetious. Such stories are totally legal.

  • Anonymous

    I know it’s a handy shorthand for the Citizen’s United case, that it “turns corporations into people,” that’s not at all what it did. Corporations are associations of real people, and that was the legal basis for the decision that they have an unimpeachable legal right to speech (which political contributions are considered). I personally think this is a specious argument, but that’s it. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R6ODYVHCB23JAQC33NPS5RLUN4 Kifre

    Corporations had legal personality long before Citizens United. But it *is* a good shorthand to show that there’s precedent for non-human entities afforded rights by law (regardless of the underpinning).

  • http://twitter.com/scottandrewh Scott A Hutchins

    I remember an article in Weekly World News in which a guy sued his boss and his doctor for trying to conceal the fact that he was a Martian, and the article said that the judge threw his case out because only “persons” are allowed to sue, and a “person” could be only a “human being” or “corporation,” and thus a Martian is not legally a person.  I assume that the article was fictitious, but if such a ruling were made, it could be a dangerous precedent.

  • http://twitter.com/scottandrewh Scott A Hutchins

    It’s extremely common to show wholesale slaughter of alien races in movies, for example, _Independence Day_.  In that case, the aliens are presented as extremely violent and seeing no value in human life.  A film like _Small Soldiers_ can play around with this concept and show it as human aggression projected (in this case, by a toy company selling soldier toys as “good” and gentle aliens as “evil”), but the same director also made _The Screwfly Solution_, in which aliens expose humans to a disease that causes males to slay females to make Earth safely habitable for them.