Talk:Strange laws

Discussion
From the AFD Articles for deletion/Dumb laws : If this were an article mindlessly repeating the fake or misrepresented "dumb laws" circulated by lazy newspaper columnists or uncritical emailers, it would be a good candidate for deletion. As it is, it provides encyclopedic information to show that such laws are often nonexistent or grossly misrepresented. An example is a book claiming that a city has "an ordinance against tieing alligators to fire hydrants" when the actual ordinance prohibits tieing ANIMALS to fire hydrants (a 'gator is an animal, right?). As references, there are such sources as the Snopes debunking of sorority houses being banned in some small town as brothels. The article as it exists could be renamed Dumb law hoaxes to more accurately represent it. Or it could have a section on actual dumb laws in addition to the hoaxes. There have been and are some genuinely dumb laws, like the "no snowball law". If a legislature calls some laws "dumb laws" and moves to repeal them, then it is likely the laws really exist. which could be included if 1)a printed source exists to call it a dumb law and b) a citation to that actual law is provided. The American Bar Association Journal and its counterparts in other countries sometimes include such material in a somewhat humorous but verified way. Some "dumb laws" are actually just old laws which had no sunset provision, such as actual law from my town from circa 1900 which required that an automobile be preceded by someone walking along ahead to assure that horses were not frightened. Edison 16:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem with calling the article "dumb law hoaxes" is that while there are plenty of web sites and books having lists of "dumb law" there are few sources investigating reliability of the "dumb law" lists. It would constitute original research to personally debunk existing "dumb law" lists as hoaxes.--Hq3473 17:53, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Citing laws
Dumblaws.com is a really poor source for citing real law, a lot of the laws cited there are not real. Thus the specific examples like "a law in Ohio prohibiting women from wearing patent leather shoes in public" and "Georgia law prohibiting keeping donkeys in bathtubs" need to either have a REAL cite to a code of law ,or it needs to be clarified that these laws are made up(which they most likely are).--Hq3473 15:07, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
 * These examples here are more for the purpose of providing examples to illustrate the concept than to tell of some real laws. Other comparable examples from another source, if you can find one, are perfectly suitable as a substitute. The main reason why I changed the introductory paragraph is to show what a dumb law is like. Shaliya waya 00:14, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
 * That is the problem, almost all "dumb laws" that are "seemingly benign" or "hard to carry out" are either complete hoaxes, or are taken out of context(such that putting back in context would no longer make the seem dumb). Thus unless you can provide some evidence to REAL dumb laws, i suggest changing the lead paragraph back to explaining how "dumb laws" are sensationalist hoaxes.--Hq3473 16:06, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

As one interested in collecting weird or unusual laws for some time, I have looked at a number of different sites and books in the past several years, and I found one that does seem to have been vetted and which does not appear to include any non-existent laws. While some of them are old or obsolete, the book shows the origin of all of them as well as lists the sources for them. I have added it to this page and it was once deleted. I am adding it back. 14 January 2010

Poll: Ten most ridiculous British and international laws
As per some poll on UK TV and reported in the Telegraph. Might be useful for sourced examples. Ha! (talk) 01:41, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Ban on dying in UK Houses of Parliament (apparently it's a Royal Palace so anyone dying there technically has a right to a state funeral)
 * Treason to place a stamp with Queens head upside down
 * Whale and sturgeon found on a British coast belong to the monarch
 * Pregnant women can relieve themselves anywhere (not so dumb, really IMHO)
 * Ohio residents banned from getting fish drunk

This is now a dumb article
It lists two (probably) real dumb laws, one previously alleged dumb law which doesn't actually exist, and six unreferenced alleged dumb laws. That's not a good score.

I reckon we should allow a week for interested parties to find references, otherwise delete them. That wouldn't leave much of an article, would it?

HiLo48 (talk) 05:44, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I have a hunch that the article can be improved with references from  and  but i don't currently have access to those.--Hq3473 (talk) 15:46, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

The law against killing camels in Arizona may be dumb, but not for the reason stated; there actually were camels in Arizona (and other regions of the southwest) as part of Army exploration experiments in the early 19th century. -- 75.142.122.231 (talk) 07:28, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

The brothel laws thing is true
um, In Orange California, the local university (Chapman) doesn't have any sorority houses for that very reason. Of course, it's a city ordinance and not like state law or anything, but it's real Source: I went to college there and was in such a sorority —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.87.52.49 (talk) 17:55, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Please be so kind as to provide the link to the said ordinance. The city of Orange, where Chapman is located, publishes their ordinances on-line here: . So it should not be to difficult to find the necessary chapter and paragraph.--Hq3473 (talk) 19:15, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * As far as i can tell the code specifically allows student housing (EXPLICITLY including sororities). See 17.14.030 --Hq3473 (talk) 19:35, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Also it seems like there were sorority house sin Chapman as recent as 1987. and it was totally a COLLEGE decision not city decision to get rid of them.--Hq3473 (talk) 19:45, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

NZ URANIUM entitlement
it's NOT an entitlement. The legislation at the end of the link is clear that universities have a quota they may not exceed, not a share that they may request. So I've changed it. -BrianSamosa, struggling to edit on an ipad — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.154.141.228 (talk) 05:56, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

I fail to see why it is a dumb law. It refers to Uranium of natural isotope composition. Such uranium is not dangerous in the sense implied. Quadparty (talk) 23:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
 * No, it isn't. It only appears so in this article because it's mentioned together with the completely unrelated ban against nuclear testing. Sjö (talk) 15:08, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Killing Welsh people
Do we really accept some random bit of BBC material which does not itself cite any reliable sources. Of course its not bloody legal to kill Welsh people in Hereford, Chester, York or wherever. This is manifestly obvious, but the lie gets peddled around again and again with various degrees of embellishment. Are we stuck peddling the same nonsense because some bored BBC journalist just recycled it? If there's a law, then there must be an authority for that law. There isn't. this page has what I suspect is the kernel of the story (the 1403 prohibition on Welsh remaining in Chester over nigh) but even that isn't the way the story is now reported. Clearly any such law would have been superseded by the Laws in Wales Acts of Henry VIII. From that time there was no distinction in law between the Welsh and the English so any "Welsh killing" law would have been meaningless. I doubt the law would have survived very much after 1403 in practice after the emergency was over. Francis Davey (talk) 19:21, 22 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Where old laws conflict with new ones, explicitly or not, the new law takes precedence. In this case, the 1861 Offenses Against The Person Act, if nothing newer, which describes murder and, of course, makes it against the law.
 * 188.29.165.225 (talk) 21:03, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Bathing suits
The Canadian example first tells us it's still on the books, then tells us it was repealed in 1930. Both these statements cannot be true.

But it was very common in many countries for such (what we would regard from our latter-day perspective as) prudery to be enforced by law, and the Canadian example is not especially noteworthy. --  Jack of Oz   [Talk]  19:59, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

It is illegal to open an avocado with the middle toe of your left foot on the roof of Cliffords tower in york between 9pm and 8:3opm unless your blind. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.248.111.37 (talk) 16:51, 11 December 2019 (UTC)


 * @178.248.111.37 And in the U.S., I think a motorcycle-drawn trailer or maybe even one drawn by any vehicle can't be legally passenger rated. 72.83.128.234 (talk) 13:14, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Distinctions
Perhaps there should be a distinction between 'bizarre laws' (the 19th century UK town clerk, when there had to be an Act of Parliament for divorces, who added 'the town clerk of X is to be divorced' leading to discussions whether this would apply to his successors), 'creative misinterpretation of laws/absence of knowledge of the context' (as with the camels), and 'archaic laws persisting' (the early 19th century UK claim for trial by battle and the abolition of outlawry mid-19th century). Jackiespeel (talk) 13:08, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Problem with the Article
As you may have guessed, I think this is a really dreadful article without any real proper direction and with a lot of misinformation on it that is very hard to get right because the article has no proper direction. Reading through the discussion on deletion it is clear that a lot of people contributing don't realise just how rubbish the repeated misinformation about law actually is. The same stories are repeated mindlessly again and again so it is very easy to find books, websites and other "authorities" to back up "dumb law" claims even if there is no basis for them. Hence trying to get this article simply deleted is just hard work. Too many editors are confused by the plethora of misinformation out there.

There is a more fundamental problem: what is a "dumb" law? Surely that is POV of the worst kind and has no place in wikipedia. Even if all the "dumb" laws we mention were true, who are we to judge whether they are dumb or not? For example: I was going to try to tidy up the poorly written summary of the Tennessee rules against ministers of religion etc. However is this dumb? You might say there are perfectly good reasons for banning atheists (because godless) ministers of religion (who should not be sitting in a legislature) and duelists (who are criminals of the worst order) from various state positions. I would not agree with that, but from some perspectives some or all of those are not "dumb".

You might say "odious" or "wrong" from a modern perspective, but then surely we could collect laws from all over the world that we did not personally like. Eg Russian laws against homosexuals.

Another way to write the article is to try to write about various phenomena, eg archaic laws remaining in force as the previous commenter suggests. The problem with that is it starts to sound like OR and I don't think anyone has written a proper study of anything around the "dumb law" phenomenon. All one has is collections of books containing half-digested nonsense.

I think there is a use in citing well known memes and either explaining or debunking them. Could we do that here? Hard work, but there will be references in many cases (though proving a non-existence is hard). What is this article about? What could it be about? Why on earth is it being defended? Francis Davey (talk) 07:49, 15 August 2013 (UTC)


 * OK so what I have done is tried to unpack some of what is being said in the often cited Tennessee example. I am not sure my layout is quite right but the idea is to cite real sources (not dumb law sites) and then to try to unpack how effective the law actually is. Francis Davey (talk) 08:11, 15 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I removed some examples if it wasn't sourced both that they were commonly cited examples of dumb laws and that the law really existed. I reorganized the content and added headings. Most of the content is now sourced and there are both US and UK examples in the text and links to Indian and African examples in the External links section. I think some of the problems mentioned in the recent AfD discussion have now been taken care of. Sjö (talk) 23:44, 11 December 2014 (UTC)


 * But now a table has been added with examples of dumb laws in different US states. Apart from the non-global PO, the problem is that is uses unreliable sources, like forums and websites without a reputation for factchecking (see the section Reasons for the existence of lists of "dumb laws"). I'm going to remove the table before it grows completely out of hand. Sjö (talk) 08:02, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

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Original research and unreliable sources
I removed a large chunk of content. For one thing, dumblaws.com is not a reliable source, and it shouldn't be cited in this article. Another major problem here is that you can't use the laws themselves to debunk or explain what they really mean. This is textbook original research. Wikipedia's policies also prevent us from speculating on how these laws arise or what might have led people to pass laws that seem, in retrospect, to be weird. If you want to debunk them, you need to cite a reliable source that explicitly debunks the "dumb law" myth. If reliable sources have nothing to say on the matter, neither do we. Two potentially quite useful sources, however, are Jan Harold Brunvand and Snopes, which will probably discuss these laws in relation to urban legends. There are also the rare news articles. I added one source to the article that discusses the "hunting camels in Arizona" myth. This is the kind of source we need, not citations to historical documents that never use the phrase "dumb law". NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 23:41, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

yellowknife lion
i heard from a friend that somebody in the 70s or 80s who had a pet lion in yellowknife, and that when the lion died the government of yellowknife banned lions. while i could find lots of articals stating that the lion did indeedd exist, i could not find anything saying that lions are banned from yellowknife. 216.108.26.35 (talk) 15:28, 3 October 2023 (UTC)