Don't Flush, Get Arrested

Did you know that it is illegal to sell beer in Nebraska unless there is a simultaneous pot of boiling soup on the stove?  Or that  butter substitutes are not allowed in state prisons in  Wisconsin?  (Hm on that one.) Or that men commit a crime when they knit during fishing season in New Jersey?  You probably didn't but that's the point.  I love to cite such odd laws when I teach, and ask students what authority such legal restrictions have.  Most often, enforcement is left up to the officer, leaving a cursing man in Michigan straight to jail/court for using profanity in the proximity of women and children--and also an unsympathetic cop.

Some other good ones:

-Kentucky:  "No female shall     appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she be escorted by at     least two officers or unless she be armed with a club".

Nebraska: The owner of every hotel in Hastings, Nebraska, must provide each     guest with a clean and pressed nightshirt. No couple, regardless of marital status, may sleep     together in the nude. Nor may they have sex unless they are wearing the special nightshirts.

A collection of these laws, state-by state, can be found here.

Don't Flush, Get Arrested

Comments

[Al]

One of the Alabama laws prohibits the wearing of masks in public. I'm guessing that's an anti-Klan law. Oklahoma had (may have been repealed) a similar law.

[eric]

While some of these obscure laws have origins/purposes that are easy enough to understand (like the bans on masks that Al mentions), the origins and purposes of others -- like NJ's ban on knitting while fishing (or, one I vaguely remember from childhood, the ban on rolling hoops down Main Street in Watkins Glen, NY) -- seem unfathomable. Tracing the origins might make for an entertaining, and possibly even enlightening, law review article. Perhaps someone has already written it, but I'm too lazy to search right now.