Archive of Our Own

In the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico

Memorandum Opinion and Order

This matter is before the Court following a bench trial on stipulated facts. For the reasons set forth below, the Court certifies the proposed classes, finds Defendant Acme Corporation liable on all counts, and sets this matter for a further hearing on damages consistent with Part V of this Order.

I. Introduction

This case arrives in the wake of Coyote v. Acme Corp., No. D-202-CV-2026-0325-T in which an individual plaintiff, Wile E. Coyote, attempted to establish that a cartoon person may recover in tort against a manufacturer whose products were intentionally designed to fail. The earlier case was narrow by its own terms: it concerned products purchased by one plaintiff for one recurring purpose. The case was ultimately ruled in Acme's favor and the judgment left open the broader systemic questions this action now presents.

Public disclosure of Acme's internal records followed the close of that litigation. Years of video evidence concerning an internal program known as Project Sisyphus, supplied by a third party and later corroborated in discovery, implicated senior Acme personnel in the program's operation and concealment. Twenty-six individually named plaintiffs retained Avery, Jones, & Maltese and brought this action on behalf of two proposed classes of similarly situated cartoon persons.

The Court held preliminary proceedings on class certification, denied Defendant's motion to dismiss, and, upon the parties' joint motion, conducted a bench trial on a stipulated factual record in lieu of a jury trial on liability. The Court makes the following findings of fact under the preponderance of the evidence standard.

II. Findings of Fact

A. Project Sisyphus

The stipulated record establishes that Acme operated an internal program, Project Sisyphus, from approximately 1985 to 2026. Sisyphus had two components, which the parties stipulate were operationally distinct but financially and administratively unified under a single research budget.

The first component involved cartoon persons formally engaged, through employment or licensing arrangements with Acme or its subsidiaries, as product demonstrators, safety consultants, or members of Acme's Research & Development department. Plaintiffs Beaky Buzzard, Cool Cat, Daffy Duck, Dr. Lorre, Frisky Puppy, George the Fox, Hippety Hopper, Instant Martian A, Instant Martian B, K-9, Leo the Lion, Mark Antony, Pete Puma, Pussyfoot, Sam Sheepdog, The Tasmanian Devil, Tweety Bird, and Yoyo Dodo fall within this group (the Test Subject Subclass).

The second component involved cartoon persons who purchased Acme products through ordinary retail channels, for ordinary purposes, with no employment relationship or professional affiliation to Acme whatsoever, and who were injured by products whose design defects were, per the stipulated record, known to Acme at the time of sale to this group (the Consumer Subclass). Plaintiffs Hubie and Bertie, Hugo the Abominable Snowman, Junyer Bear, Mama Bear, Nelly the Giraffe, Porky Pig, and Wile E. Coyote fall within this group as to certain of their Acme product purchases.¹

Acme's internal correspondence, portions of which entered the public record after Coyote v. Acme Corp., describes "toons" (cartoon persons) generally as "ideal test platforms" on account of their "resilience and characteristics that permit iterative failure testing at a frequency and severity no human subject could ethically endure." The Court finds this characterization accurate as a statement of biological fact. It is also precisely the central conduct at issue in this litigation.

B. The Consent Defense and the Professional Mayhem Doctrine

Acme's central defense at trial was not that the testing on cartoon persons did not occur, but that it was not wrongful, ethically or legally. Defendant argued that each member of the Test Subject Subclass is a professional entertainer whose ordinary livelihood consists of appearing to suffer exactly this category of harm - combustion, collapse, structural failure, impact, and the like - for audiences and for compensation. A cartoon person paid or otherwise employed to be flattened by an anvil eight times a week during the course of chasing their professional partner, Acme contended, cannot be heard to complain of being flattened by an anvil in a laboratory, as it is expected within their line of work.

The Court rejects this argument.

The record establishes, without meaningful dispute, that plaintiff Sam Sheepdog's employment - the paradigm case for Acme's argument, given that Mr. Sheepdog's profession involves clocking in each morning to engage in sanctioned physical combat with a coworker, Ralph Wolf, before clocking out at day's end on cordial terms - is governed by known rules, a fixed schedule, and outcomes both parties understand in advance to be reversible by the terms of the performance itself. A cartoon performer's consent to appear injured within a bounded, mutually understood theatrical frame is not consent to be secretly enrolled, without their knowledge, in an experimental program whose outcomes were being measured for a purpose of commercial refinement of products for an entirely different market that the performance was never designed to serve and that Mr. Sheepdog or Mr. Wolf was never told about or consented to be involved with.

Although the decision made in Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (D.C. Cir. 1972), arose in medical negligence, its core principle applies equally here: consent is meaningless when material facts are withheld. Acme relied on the public's familiarity with cartoon resilience to ensure no one - audience, regulator, or the cartoon person themself - would ask whether a catastrophic event was anything more than just entertainment or flawed product testing for a singular purpose.

C. Damages Record: The St. Looney's Evidence

Plaintiffs introduced treatment records and expert testimony from St. Looney's for the Exceptionally Looney - a psychiatric facility specializing in cartoon-specific trauma - in support of their contention that while Acme's products caused no permanent physical injury, they caused lasting psychological harm not subject to the same reconstitutive process as the body.

Dr. Syci Ahtrech, treating psychiatrist and the facility's clinical director, testified to a diagnostic presentation she and her colleagues have termed Recurrent Catastrophic Exposure Disorder ("RCED"). The disorder is characterized by hypervigilance around ordinary household and industrial objects (crates, pianos, toy sticks of dynamite, buckets of ordinary house paint, roller-skates, and the like), involuntary anticipatory flinching or bouts of hysteria upon the mere delivery of an Acme-branded package, and a marked inability, in several patients, to remain calm upon even hearing the name "Acme" uttered in conversation.

The Court finds that RCED is caused, in substantial part, by the frequency, severity, and nature of Acme's testing cycles.

III. Class Certification

The Court certifies both subclasses under the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. Commonality is satisfied because the central question - whether Acme's concealment of Sisyphus's true purpose defeats any defense premised on cartoon resilience or professional consent - is common to every class member regardless of subclass, notwithstanding that the two subclasses experienced materially different injuries. Typicality is satisfied because each named plaintiff's claims arise from the same course of conduct, even where the specific product and specific harm differ. Adequacy is uncontested. The Court is satisfied that the interests of the Test Subject Subclass and the Consumer Subclass, while distinct as to damages, are not in conflict as to liability, and that both are well served by common counsel and a common liability trial, with damages to be determined on a subclass-specific basis as set forth in Part V.

IV. Discussion

A. Strict Products Liability under Restatement (Second) of Torts § 402A

New Mexico recognizes strict liability for products placed on the market in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user or consumer. Stang v. Hertz Corp., 1972-NMSC-031, 83 N.M. 730, 497 P.2d 732. Acme renews, as it did in the underlying Coyote v. Acme Corp. litigation, the argument that a product cannot be "unreasonably dangerous" to a class of persons whose injuries from that product are, in the ordinary course, temporary and without a lasting physical impact.

The Court rejects this argument. Section 402A protects the consumer from unreasonable danger; it does not condition that protection on the danger being permanent or irreversible. Pain, temporary disassembly, psychological trauma, and loss of bodily integrity remain compensable harms regardless of the speed of recovery. See UJI 13-1807 NMRA. The evidence at trial, most pointedly the St. Looney's record, establishes that the premise underlying Acme's argument is not even factually sound: the physical injury may be very temporary when it comes to cartoon injuries, but the record establishes that the psychological consequences of repeated, and catastrophic product failures leading to traumatic injuries are not.

B. Battery and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress

Battery requires intentional harmful or offensive contact. See Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 13, 18. Acme intentionally caused its products to make contact with class members in ways it knew would cause harm, and did so, as to the Test Subject Subclass, without disclosing that the true nature of the encounter was experimental rather than professional, and, as to the Consumer Subclass, without disclosing that the products' defects were known and deliberate rather than incidental. In both settings the concealment operated the same way: class members were led to believe they were participating in ordinary performance or ordinary retail purchase when, in fact, they were generating data for a research program whose existence and purpose had been withheld. Consent obtained under either circumstance is vitiated by the concealment of the transaction's true character. cf. Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (D.C. Cir. 1972). The same conduct supports liability for intentional infliction of emotional distress as to both subclasses. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 46.

C. Acme's Innovation-Slowing Argument

Acme urges that recognizing liability on this record will slow product innovation generally. The Court is unpersuaded. The law has long imposed the costs of injury on those who profit from placing defective products into the stream of commerce. Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc., 59 Cal. 2d 57, 63, 377 P.2d 897 (1963). Ordinary product testing that sometimes produces injury is one thing. Deliberately selecting a population for testing precisely because that population can endure injuries the ultimate consumer market will not tolerate is another. Where a manufacturer chooses test subjects for their capacity to survive the test, the policy rationales underlying enterprise liability are at their zenith, not their limit. A test subject chosen specifically for resilience is not, for that reason, chosen fairly.

D. The Historical Classification of Cartoon Persons

Cartoon persons have never been the direct subject of a considered legal framework so much as the incidental byproduct of whatever dispute happened to reach a court first. Early industry practice, and the handful of decisions arising from it, treated cartoon persons largely as studio property - assets to be licensed, retired, or recast at the studio's discretion, with no more standing to object than the equipment used to animate them. Later disputes, arising typically from merchandising or endorsement contracts rather than from any deliberate inquiry into personhood or ethical concerns, began to recognize individual cartoon persons as parties capable of contracting, of being defamed, of holding a name and a likeness in their own right. Neither line of authority displaced the other. They developed in parallel, answering different questions for different litigants, and no court was ever asked - until this action - to reconcile them.

The result is a body of law that treats cartoon persons as property in one courtroom and as persons in the next, depending on which framing served the dispute at hand, with no doctrine requiring consistency between the two, often leaving cartoon persons in a legal grey area. This is not a novel pattern, animal welfare law underwent a similar evolution, extending protection incrementally and in response to specific disclosures rather than by any unified theory of animal interests. Human subjects research law underwent a comparable transformation, moving from a largely self-regulated practice to one governed by mandatory informed consent. While the 1947 Nuremberg Code established the core ethical blueprint, this shift was fully realized only decades later through subsequent international declarations and comprehensive statutory frameworks, and again, decades later, only after the 1974 Tuskegee-induced National Research Act forced a reckoning that legislatures had shown no prior inclination to undertake on principle alone. Even as domestic protections grew, this reactive cycle repeated globally decades later; it took the 2000 public exposure of Pfizer’s 1996 Trovan trials in Nigeria to force international regulatory frameworks to finally reckon with the legal grey area of extraterritorial and offshore clinical testing.

Each of those reforms arrived after the harm became visible, not before - only coming into action when the courts were forced to address them, rather than choosing to. Neither arrived because a court sat down in the abstract and asked what protection a vulnerable population was owed. Cartoon persons have had no equivalent moment. Not because no comparable conduct occurred, but because it occurred in private, largely sustained for four decades under Acme's internal program whose existence the corporation took considerable and successful pains to conceal from the public eye. The absence of precedent governing the testing of cartoon persons is not evidence that such testing raised no legal question. It is evidence only that no court had yet been shown that it was happening, and had yet to be asked - until this action - to consider the legal and ethical implications of such testing.

E. The Regulatory Personhood Gap

Acme's internal characterization of cartoon persons as subjects offering "resilience... no human subject could ethically endure" is, against that backdrop, not merely a stray turn of phrase. It is the predictable exploitation of an oversight gap the law had simply never been asked to close, and the Court treats it as a load-bearing legal position rather than an idle one.

Human subjects research is governed, as a matter of federal common practice long predating this litigation, by a framework requiring institutional review and informed consent precisely because the subject is a person capable of giving or withholding it. See 45 C.F.R. § 46. Animal research, by contrast, is governed by a welfare-based framework that imposes no consent requirement at all, on the theory that the subject cannot meaningfully supply one, and substitutes institutional oversight and minimum care standards in its place to prevent unnecessary pain, unapproved experimental procedures, and widespread suffering. See 7 U.S.C. § 2131 et seq. The two regimes do not overlap, as they are not intended to. But as a result, neither framework, standing alone, supplies a complete answer to the status of cartoon persons.

Acme's defense, stripped of its framing as a labor dispute about professional mayhem and reasonable recognition of inherent risks in the workplace, amounts to an assertion that its test subjects fell into neither category. Not human enough to require consent. Not animal enough to require oversight. The record does not support a finding that this was an oversight on Acme's part. Plaintiff Sam Sheepdog holds a salaried position with a fixed schedule and a coworker he addresses by name. Plaintiff Dr. Lorre holds a research title. These are not the attributes of a population that fell through a regulatory crack by accident. They are the attributes of a population selected, in part, because the oversight was there and could be exploited for gain.

The Court is aware of no authority requiring it to invent a third regulatory category to close this gap, and declines the invitation to do so. It is sufficient to observe that Acme's own conduct establishes it knew the gap existed and structured Project Sisyphus to sit inside it. A defendant may not describe a population as too resilient to warrant the protections owed to a human subject while simultaneously declining to extend it the protections owed to a research animal, and then argue that the absence of any applicable protection is proof that none was required. The absence was manufactured. It is not, for that reason, a defense.

This finding bears directly on the commonality analysis in Part III. Whatever theatrical or contractual arrangement each individual plaintiff believed themselves to be operating under, each was subject to the same antecedent classification decision, made by Acme, applied uniformly across the Test Subject Subclass, before any individual instance of testing occurred. More than anything else, it is this decision - not any single anvil dropped, nor any single crate of dynamite bought - that the class holds in common.

V. Order

For the foregoing reasons, IT IS ORDERED that:

1. The Test Subject Subclass and Consumer Subclass are CERTIFIED as defined above;
2. Judgment on liability is entered for Plaintiffs and the certified classes on all counts - strict products liability, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress;
3. This matter is set for a further evidentiary hearing on damages, at which the Court will receive evidence specific to each subclass, including but not limited to medical and psychiatric treatment costs, lost performance and touring income attributable to RCED-related incapacity, and economic losses arising from the purchase of products materially different from their representations; and
4. Nothing in this Order forecloses either subclass from seeking, at the damages hearing, recognition of harm not reducible to a physical injury that has since resolved.

So Ordered.