I think the only real crazy law in my work in progress is ‘devil law’.
So, ordinarily, it’s illegal for superheroes to kill villains. Even if it was an accident, a hero can have their license taken and the pants sued right off their legs for causing a villain’s death. With one very prominent exception: the prophetic devil.
The first superhero left a prophesy that the world would one day be ravaged by a monster that consumes magic. Most countries fear this prophesy–although no one knows how exactly it’s going to go down–and therefore have laws excusing heroes to do whatever it takes to stop it. For all intents and purposes, the prophetic devil has no human rights, even if they manifest in the world in human form (spoilers: they do). As long as a hero can prove they fought the actual devil, they are excused in anything they decide to do to them. Murder, torture, theft, assault, blackmail, hate crimes, general harassment, etcetera–anything goes. Uh, sexual violation of Satan might be frowned upon, not because of any law, pity or concern for the devil, but because most people would be like ‘why would you want to?!’
This revocation of human rights also extends to anyone ‘corrupted’ by the devil, ie having received stolen magic from it. It’s believed (incorrectly so) that this corrupted magic will warp the person’s mind beyond saving, and that their murder would be a mercy killing (it would not: they remain fully cognizant, moral, able-bodied and capable of feeling fear and pain. ‘Corrupted’ magic is completely indistinguishable from inherited magic, and is even possible to acquire by accident).
Devil law was put in place to assure heroes could do whatever it took to stop, or at least mitigate, the ‘ravaging’. To make sure heroes wouldn’t feel forced to spare a monster in a human’s body and risk them escaping and coming back with an absolute vengeance for fear of legal consequences, losing their job and income, or being sentenced to life or at least decades in prison, just because the prophetic devil may have a human appearance and human genetics.
Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and what devil law actually results in is a green light for confused or sadistic superheroes to hunt and beat and hate my goofy, well-meaning protagonist as he just tries to have fun with magic, make his parents proud, and protect his friends. It also results in a massive fight between people thinking ‘if he weren’t really evil deep down and just lying to corrupt everyone, we wouldn’t be endorsed by the law and the God-Hero to attack him, so it’s fine to try and kill this lad’ and people realizing ‘hey, um, this guy appears to have actual human feelings and is acting like more of a hero than most of us, and I’m starting to wonder if we might have been lied to’.
