Unusual, humorous, or absurd laws - Citations Required Edition

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s a long tradition on the Internet of lists of supposed funny or absurd laws in various jurisdictions. It seems to be the case that many of these so called “laws” are either made up out of whole cloth or are interpolations of specific absurd behavior that falls under a more general and sensible statute. For example, it might be the case that it is illegal in Oklahoma to hunt whales from a moving car, but that the real reason is that there is a general statute banning hunting and fishing generally from moving road motor vehicles. The legislature didn’t get down and dirty and pass a law just for whales.

What are some real laws that are unusual, humorous/funny, or absurd on their face for which you can provide an actual citation? At a minimum, you should provide a code citation if the law is a statute or a case citation if the law is a case law. Internet links are encouraged but not required.

While substantive criminal or traffic laws are a big part of the funny law tradition, I’m not limiting the thread to that. Citations to funny, etc. civil substantive laws, procedural laws, or administrative laws are acceptable.

Some reasons that laws could be funny, etc. are that the law as written is absurdly specific (e.g. a law against wearing green hats on Thursdays), absurdly vague (e.g. it is illegal for a man to act “girly” in public), absurdly unenforceable (e.g. it is illegal not to believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ), or that the law purports to regulate things that would or could almost never happen for practical purposes (e.g. a law in Puerto Rico making it illegal to live on an iceberg - you don’t get icebergs in the tropics!)

This thread is not limited to laws in the US.

I will permit laws that were repealed in the recent past, say the last 20 years or so. Laws from hundreds of years ago don’t count.

I will start.

[QUOTE=Code of Virginia, Section 46.2-1060 Emphases mine]

It shall be unlawful for any vehicle to be equipped with or for any person to use on any vehicle any siren or exhaust, compression or spark plug whistle, or horn except as may be authorized in this title… It shall further be unlawful for any person at any time to use a horn otherwise than as a reasonable warning or to make any unnecessary or unreasonably loud or harsh sound by means of a horn or other warning device…

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+46.2-1060

[/quote]

In other words, your car horn can’t be “unnecessarily” or “unreasonably” loud or harsh. What counts as unnecessary or unreasonable is not stated.

2

Conversely to your post, Rhode Island requires you to make a loud noise when passing on the left:

3

In South Africa, the Witchcraft Suppression Act 3 of 1957 provides that:

Some of the other offences in that act are also a bit weird.

4

That’s a really good one. Thanks. The presumption of the cause of death is sort of weird too. I wonder if the inference of the cause of death would permit a charge of murder to be sustained against a witch or wizard who had cast a death spell shortly before a person had a heart attack.

In case anyone was thinking about asking, I’m including laws that made sense when they were passed but were rendered absurd, humorous, funny, or stupid by the passage of time or changes in technology or culture. For example, a municipal law that required businesses to maintain hitches for customers to tie horses too arguably makes sense in 1862. If the law was still around in 1997, it would be an absurd law.

For the nitpickers: Yes, it appears that “loud or harsh” only refers to “unreasonably”, not “unnecessary”, in that it seems to prohibit honks that are either “unnecessary” or “unreasonably loud or harsh”

5

I always cite s 8 of Victoria’s Summary Offences Act 1966, which provides that it’s an offence to drive a goat harnessed to a vehicle in or through a public place…

6

Bingo - in Antigua we are supposed to toot our horns on overtaking AND we have a law against ‘obeah’ a form of occult or supernatural power;

http://www.laws.gov.ag/acts/chapters/cap-298.pdf

I’m sure there are things we’re not supposed to do to goats too.

7

The presumption of the cause of death, and the increased penalty in the event of a consequential death, only applies to s. 1(a), which deals with witch-smelling/witch-hunting; and s. 1(b), which deals with using witchcraft to accuse another of causing death, damage, etc. Casting a death spell would only violate s. 1(e), which carries a lesser penalty. The purpose of the presumption is to punish vigilante witch-hunting, which is still a big problem in some rural areas, and to prevent vigilante assaults on people when a witchdoctor claims to have supernatural proof that they caused death, damage, etc. In other words, it makes witchfinders/witchdoctors culpable for deaths cause in consequence of accusations of witchcraft; it doesn’t apply to deaths claimed to be supernaturally caused.

I believe the courts would interpret the presumption in s. 2 to only apply for the purposes of the increased penalty provision in s. 1(i), not for supporting a charge of murder. An attempt to use it for a murder charge would probably be found to be an unconstitutional reverse onus provision; many such provisions have been struck down for violating the presumption of innocence. The whole act is under review for constitutionality anyway.

Incidentally, one might assume that the act is no longer enforced, but no: a man was convicted in 2005 for naming another man as a wizard, and sentenced to the full ten years, which was reduced on review to four years with two years suspended. Although it is not mentioned in the judgment, I suspect the sentence was so severe because it occurred in a region in which witch-hunting and vigilante killing of alleged witches is still a serious problem.

8

Rule number one in the Missouri wildlife code book…Make everything illegal except what we make legal later in the book. If it isn’t mentioned as legal; its therefore illegal. source code below and conversations with a family member who’s job it is to know.

9

While that’s a pretty across-the-board prohibition, it seems to me that you’ve fallen afoul of the same issue brought up in the OP: narrowly defining for comic effect a law written for much broader cases.

The law you cite says “mammal, or other form of wildlife,” not “rats and mice” specifically.

10

Yeah, I see that now. It still chafes me that the wildlife code of Missouri is written this way, so much that I jumped at the opportunity without fully comprehending the OP. Be that as it may, it still is technically illegal to kill, trap or even possess any such defined animal, be it shrew, toad, mouse or minnow.

Still pisses me off…

grumble, grumble…I think I’ll just sit here and sulk.

11

I think **Sigene **has a legitimate case here. We would consider a law banning “hunt[ing] whales from a moving car” funny because of its specificity and therefore it’s fair to object that the law is actually more general.

We object to a law against killing mice for a different reason to wit, that it should not be illegal to kill mice. Totally different thing.

12

It used to be illegal in Austin, TX to shoot at Indians from a streetcar on Congress Avenue.

13

OP asked for cites.

14

Misuse of the images, characters, names or slogans of Smokey Bear or Woodsy Owl can get you time in a federal lockup.

15

To a lawyer, there’s nothing particularly odd about this. While laws shouldn’t (and, constitutionally speaking, may not be) excessively vague, that doesn’t mean that they need to be an exact mathematical formula, either. There’s room for human judgment.

ETA: Also, I think Bubb Rubb has something to say about this.

16

I, for one, am entirely supportive of a law prohibiting unnecessarily loud horns.

17

Was it legal to shoot Indians elsewhere? Or legal to shoot non-Indians from a streetcar on Congress ave? Or legal to shoot Indians from a streetcar if it was located on another street?

If the answer is no, then this is probably just one of those silly interpolations that isn’t actually in the text of the law. It’s illegal to shoot people in general, so of course this specific scenario would be illegal as well.

18

Used to be?
-D/a

19

There was a commercial a while back that made light of the “true fact” that it is illegal to perform a window puppet show in New York City. Turns out it’s true:

Link.

20

You are apparently too young to have experienced the cornucopia that was the JC Whitney automotive accessories catalog. You could get wolf whistles, horns that played 36 different tunes, claxons, 100dB train horns, spark devices that intentionally made your car backfire and blades that went in the exhaust pipe to give your car the constant whistle that falling bombs in cartoons make.

It was pretty much the same as loud exhaust laws now. If someone didn’t like it, you were pulled over. There may be decibel guidelines, but it’s hard to justify a need for your car to play four bars of Yellow Rose Of Texas.