Picturing Justice, the On-Line Journal of Law and Popular Culture



Sheila Simon
Assistant Clinical Professor of Law
School of Law
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901

 

Read other reviews:

-Internet Movie Database
-All Movie Guide

 

 

 

Is it creepy, illegal, or both for Austin Powers to love Mrs. Kensington and later fall for her daughter Vanessa? And when Austin marries Vanessa and she turns out to be an exploding femme-bot, what is left of the marriage? Was the marriage void or voidable?


Feature article

Austin Powers: A Shagadelic Focus on Family Law, Baby

by Sheila Simon

Some teachers think the subject matter of their class is so all encompassing that it affects everything, right?

Guilty. I'm one of those teachers. I teach family law, and I see it everywhere - in the newspaper, in novels, and in movies. That's where it becomes fun. Using movies as a common reference I can show students what I see, and give them an idea of how they may see things by the end of the semester. Move over, Professor Kingsfield - Austin Powers helps me teach family law!

When I saw Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, I decided to use it as a focus for my first class that semester. In addition to the usual assignment of cases on the development of law regarding procreation and privacy, I asked the students to contemplate the family relationships portrayed in The Spy Who Shagged Me, and in its predecessor, Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.

In the first class session I asked for a volunteer to describe the two movies and note the family relationships. As expected, more hands were raised for this job than for the description of Griswold v Connecticut. The relationships noted were:

Parent and child:
Dr. Evil and Scott Evil
Mrs. Kensington and Vanessa Kensington

Husband and wife:
Austin Powers and Vanessa Kensington

Unmarried sexual partners:
Felicity Shagwell and Fat Bastard,
Frau Farbissina and Unibrow
Dr. Evil and Frau Farbissina
Austin Powers and Felicity Shagwell

Cloned and clone:
Dr. Evil and Mini-Me

With those relationships established, we explored how family law was important to the plot, and how family law would be called upon to resolve the many questions presented by the movie.

Is it creepy, illegal, or both for Austin Powers to love Mrs. Kensington and later fall for her daughter Vanessa? And when Austin marries Vanessa and she turns out to be an exploding femme-bot, what is left of the marriage? Was the marriage void or voidable?

Who could inherit from Dr. Evil - his son, Scott Evil, or Dr. Evil's clone, Mini-Me, or both?

What if Felicity Shagwell becomes pregnant after her encounter with Fat Bastard? Would Fat Bastard have any rights regarding the child? Would he have any obligations? If Austin were to marry Felicity, what rights would Austin have in regard to the child? Why is the term "bastard" an insult? And how recently was it that the statute on establishing parentage was called the Bastardy Act?

Can Frau Farbissina and Unibrow marry? Does their legal status depend on where they live? Can Unibrow get health insurance through Frau Farbissina's employment at Virtucon? Does it depend on where Virtucon is located? Assuming Frau Farbissina is Scott Evil's mother, does Farbissina's relationship with Unibrow create any problems for a continued relationship between Farbissina and Scott?

But the best set of questions involves the relationship between Dr. Evil and his son Scott. Scott is either the product of artificial insemination of Dr. Evil's sperm or he is the love child of Dr. Evil and Frau Farbissina. Should the nature of the child's origin have an impact on the legal relationships between the parties? How does one establish paternity either way? Are there time limits on establishing paternity, and could those time limits be tolled if the biological father did not know about the existence of the child?

These questions about the nature of how a child is created and how that can affect the legal status of the relationships were so good that I brought the class back to think about them again at the end of the semester - in the final exam. The students may not appreciate my low-brow humor, but they adopted the practice of looking for family law everywhere. And that kind of thing really is my bag, baby.

Posted January 16, 2002

Would you like to comment on this article? Please submit your comments here.

 Top of page

 Home | Silver Screen | Small Screen | News & Views