Star Trek: Discovering valuable law lessons

Enterprise crew sometimes better than law school, writes Gavin MacFadyen.

While Trekkies everywhere are excited over the arrival of Star Trek: Discovery, it was an earlier series in that venerable franchise that influenced my professional life as a lawyer.

Thirty years ago, the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation coincided with my first year of law school at McGill University. My legal apprenticeship would have been well-served if I skipped class and only had that series upon which to draw.

In the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, an omniscient and meddlesome being called Q places the Enterprise crew on trial for the crimes of humanity. “You will now answer to the charge of being a grievously savage race,” says Q, acting as judge.

“‘Grievously savage’ could mean anything. I will answer only specific charges,” Capt. Jean-Luc Picard fires back. He is, in essence, challenging the legal sufficiency of the charge as being void for vagueness.

Another first season episode brought home that punishment must always be informed by fairness. In Justice, laws on a seemingly idyllic planet have only one punishment: death. Wesley Crusher, teenage son of the ship’s doctor, damages some flowers while playing catch.

Captain Picard is now faced with a moral choice: If he stays true to the Prime Directive (i.e. absolute noninterference in developing cultures) the result would be Wesley’s execution.

What does Picard do? He prevents the execution, of course! He drove home the point that the common law must always reflect common sense.

In what is perhaps the most widely lauded episode of the series, The Measure of a Man, a Star Fleet scientist wishes to appropriate the Enterprise’s android, Data, and dismantle him for study and possible replication.

A hearing is convened. Picard argues that Data is a sentient being who should be accorded the right of self-determination. Picard emphasizes that any ruling today will bind all the potential androids that come after. A new race of beings could be subject to “servitude and slavery.”

It was a valuable early reminder that legal rulings create precedents. As well, Picard was willing to stand with those who would otherwise stand alone.

Jean-Luc Picard always asked what should happen and not what a statute said must happen. He identified the just result, then constructed an argument to make it happen. He boldly went where all lawyers should be willing to go. Gavin MacFadyen is a McGill graduate and lawyer in Jamestown, N.Y.