Here’s another TNG bit of lore that bugged me as filler, although this one feels like less of a nitpick. An entire episode’s premise turns on it and it suggests that the Federation will literally sell its people into slavery if they happen to be in a jurisdiction where that’s legal. In S4E13, “The Devil’s Due,” space Satan comes to collect on a thousand-year-old contract to enslave a planet while the Enterprise happens to be in orbit to check up on some Federation scientists. According to the contract’s legal terms, space Satan gets the Enterprise as well because they were in orbit around the planet and thus within the bounds of the contract when it came due.
Okay, so the terms of the contract include everything in the planet, including its orbit, and under the existing legal system, people can promise the property of their distant descendants as part of a contract. Sure, whatever. But the Enterprise isn’t governed by that legal system. It’s governed by Federation law and whatever international law exists in the Star Trek galaxy (it’s not clear if there’s any at all). Surely, in both cases, they would not permit a starship and its crew to fall under the legal ownership of space Satan just because they happened to be in orbit around a planet when their debt came due. The people who made the contract do not own the Enterprise, so they can’t give it away. It doesn’t matter if their own local laws claim otherwise – Federation law, surely, does not allow slavery regardless of what contracts are signed, surely does not allow its citizens’ personal property to be signed away against their will just because some foreign law proclaims they forfeited it merely by entering another planet’s orbit at the wrong time, and very certainly will not give away one of the most advanced starships in their fleet because of a technicality in some other planet’s legal code.
If space Satan is a being of laws and contracts at all, then she has no claim to the Enterprise, which operates under Federation law, and Federation law would have to be braindead to consider itself subject to local laws to the point of giving away a starship and its crew.
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