Learning Law from Bill and Ted

I just saw a trailer for the upcoming Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third installment of the Bill & Ted trilogy. Whether it’s because I haven’t been to a movie since months before the pandemic started and, thus, haven’t seen any trailers, or because I have no interest in seeing a follow-up to Bogus Journey, I had no idea Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter would be reprising their roles.

In Face the Music, Bill and Ted are now in their late 40s, and the Wyld Stallyns have failed to catapult them to rock stardom. With Bill and Ted having failed to write the song that will unite the world, the two decide to travel into the future and steal the song that their future selves have written.

“Isn’t that stealing?” Ted asks.

Bill astutely replies, “How is that stealing if we're stealing from ourselves, dude?”

It’s no wonder that Bill has always introduced himself as “Bill S. Preston, Esquire” in the original Bill & Ted movies. After all, he’s absolutely right—at least for bar exam purposes.

Most bar exams test general applicable principles of law and the common law.

Larceny is a theft crime. For bar exam purposes, larceny is defined as the taking and carrying away of the personal property of another by trespass (i.e., without consent) with the intent to permanently deprive the person of his interest in the property. As this definition indicates, a person cannot commit a larceny (or steal) by taking property if he honestly believed—whether reasonably or unreasonably—that the property was his own.

So to Bill and the movie’s writers, I say that dropping this tidbit of legal knowledge was “most excellent”—even if it wasn't done with, dare I say, the requisite mens rea.

And, of course, “Party on, dude!”