The Coyote Finally Has His Day in Court

The premise comes from Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker piece Coyote v. Acme, written as an attorney's opening statement. It catalogues eighty-five purchases – among them a Rocket Sled, Rocket Skates, bombs and Spring-Powered Shoes – allegedly responsible for personal injury, lost income and mental suffering. Frazier even supplies exhibits, invokes 15 U.S.C. section 2072, claims punitive damages and points out that ACME enjoys a virtual monopoly over the specialised equipment required by a professional predator. The joke works because legal prose treats cartoon catastrophe with a perfectly straight face.

The film enlarges that conceit into a legal comedy mixing animation and live action. Wile E. hires billboard personal-injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) – Saul Goodman by way of the Southwest – whose advertising promises more confidence than his practice can deliver. Lana Condor’s Paige, Avery’s trainee lawyer, sees a pattern where Kevin sees one small case. Across the courtroom stands Buddy Crane (John Cena), ACME’s gleaming corporate counsel and Kevin’s former law-school classmate. Economic inequality arrives in court wearing an excellent suit.

Cartoon Logic Meets International Law

The collision between product liability and cartoon physics produces the film’s sharpest questions. ACME argues misuse: what reasonable consumer straps spring-powered shoes to a boulder or buys explosives to catch a bird? The defence reaches causation, comparative fault and assumption of risk. Wile E.’s repeated purchases also seem disastrous: after so many failures, how could he still trust the brand? Yet repetition cuts both ways. It may show that the customer knew the danger; it may also show that the manufacturer knew its products repeatedly failed and kept selling them. One may think to the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which ask firms to prevent unreasonable risks even when this arises from “foreseeable improper use or misuse”, language apparently drafted with Wile E. in mind. The cartoons’ running gag becomes evidence of notice, corporate indifference and, potentially, the sort of conduct that makes punitive damages reasonable.

Damages pose an even stranger problem. What compensation is owed to someone who returns intact in the next scene after being flattened by an anvil? Slapstick trains us to regard pain as reversible and therefore weightless. Litigation changes the frame: every explosion becomes an accident, every Coyote-shaped hole in the rock an exhibit, and the comic target of the narrative becomes a rights-bearing claimant.

Even private international law makes an unlikely entrance here. The case slips in an interlocal conflict-of-laws exam: the Coyote resides in Arizona “and contiguous States”; ACME is incorporated in Delaware and sells everywhere by mail. European lawyers would immediately think of Brussels I bis and Article 5 of Rome II...

Representation: giving the Coyote a Voice

Wile E. communicates through signs. That familiar cartoon device gives advocacy an unexpectedly serious function in the film. Kevin must speak for a client who has no audible voice, social standing or institutional power. The lawyer’s role is therefore more than technical. Representation becomes the practical condition for being heard at all. The supporting cast then turns familiar legal stereotypes into comic masks: the corner-cutting practitioner, the young idealist, the corporate shark and the judge examining portable holes with waning solemnity.

Why Pop Culture Matters to Lawyers

This is why popular culture deserves sustained legal attention. In The Law in Graphic Narratives: Legal Perspectives on Comics, Manga and Anime (De Gruyter, 2024), Giuseppe Martinico and I collected essays that show how comics, manga and anime reflect assumptions about law while helping to form them. The chapters test that idea through legality and justice in Daredevil and Batman, lawyering on She-Hulk’s Earth-616, rights and identity in the X-Men, and the sovereignty fetish of Wakanda and Latveria. Our follow-up, Graphic Law and Drawn Justice: A Legal Analysis (Anthem Press, 2025), widens the lens to include disability and access to justice in Daredevil; discrimination in the X-Men; international law in Harry Potter and heavy metal; the lawyer projected by Suits; and Charlie Hebdo’s graphic trial reports. Together, the books treat popular culture as evidence of legal consciousness and as a teaching method that makes doctrine visible, memorable and open to challenge. Coyote vs Acme performs that method in real time. It makes product liability, access to justice and inequality of arms immediately legible; it also reveals which images of lawyers and courts circulate far beyond law schools.

One Last Fall

There is a final joke outside the film. Warner Bros. completed Coyote vs Acme and then shelved it. Following industry and public protest, Ketchup Entertainment acquired the distribution rights and finally brought it to cinemas. A story about an individual struggling to be heard by a giant corporation almost disappeared because the giant corporation that made it decided no one should see it. Once again, the Coyote fell into the canyon. Once again, he climbed out.

*Gianpaolo Maria Ruotolo is Professor of International Law at the University of Foggia.