Up until the astronaut part, I was fully convinced that this is a law school theoretical question for an inheritance class, because that’s exactly where the vagaries of “is she my sister?” would also arise.
Then again, if we include time dilation due to near-lightspeed travel, we then have to deal with oddball inheritance cases like if your sister dies mid-travel but then you also die. The Uniform Simultaneous Death Act adopted by several US States would only apply if the difference in time-of-death is within 120 hours, but the Act is silent as to which reference plane will be used, especially if your sister is considered to be traveling “internationally” due to being in space, thus not being in the same US state or time zone as you might be in.
So maybe the entire question is a valid inheritance case study after all.
Do timezones have anything to do with the problem at hand? They’re a shift of the clock to sync the clock with the Sun visually rolling across the sky. The inherent time is the same on the entire planet. Since it doesn’t really make sense to track the Sun’s relative position in the sky far enough away from it, they’d either default to UTC or the time on Earth of wherever in the US the death took place.
For timekeeping, you’re correct that timezones shouldn’t affect anything. But in some parts of law, the local time of a particular place (eg state capital, naval observatory, etc…) is what might control when a deadline has passed or not.
If we then have to reconcile that with high speed space travel, then there’s a possibility of ending up in a legal pickle even when the timekeeping aspect might be simple. But now we’re well into legal fanfiction, which is my favorite sort but we don’t have any guardrails ground rules to follow.
Up until the astronaut part, I was fully convinced that this is a law school theoretical question for an inheritance class, because that’s exactly where the vagaries of “is she my sister?” would also arise.
Then again, if we include time dilation due to near-lightspeed travel, we then have to deal with oddball inheritance cases like if your sister dies mid-travel but then you also die. The Uniform Simultaneous Death Act adopted by several US States would only apply if the difference in time-of-death is within 120 hours, but the Act is silent as to which reference plane will be used, especially if your sister is considered to be traveling “internationally” due to being in space, thus not being in the same US state or time zone as you might be in.
So maybe the entire question is a valid inheritance case study after all.
Do timezones have anything to do with the problem at hand? They’re a shift of the clock to sync the clock with the Sun visually rolling across the sky. The inherent time is the same on the entire planet. Since it doesn’t really make sense to track the Sun’s relative position in the sky far enough away from it, they’d either default to UTC or the time on Earth of wherever in the US the death took place.
For timekeeping, you’re correct that timezones shouldn’t affect anything. But in some parts of law, the local time of a particular place (eg state capital, naval observatory, etc…) is what might control when a deadline has passed or not.
If we then have to reconcile that with high speed space travel, then there’s a possibility of ending up in a legal pickle even when the timekeeping aspect might be simple. But now we’re well into legal fanfiction, which is my favorite sort but we don’t have any
guardrailsground rules to follow.