- If you've ever spent any length of time on the internet,
you've probably come across an article like this:
"Ridiculous laws that actually exist around the world",
"Australia's Dumb Laws: 10 Laws You May Not Have Heard Of",
"24 Weird British Laws I Can't Believe
"Still Exist in the UK".
And they'll include a list of facts like these:
Putting a stamp with the queen upside down is illegal
and technically an act of treason,
London taxis are required
to carry a bale of hay at all times,
in Victoria it's illegal to change your own light bulb.
So reading them, you might think,
how could that possibly be true?
Well, it turns out, they're not.
Every one of those facts is incorrect.
So I wanted to dive in and find out
why these articles get it wrong so much,
as well as why are they so common,
and give you a guide to create your own dumb law.
And there are different laws around the world
that people find interesting.
In Singapore, chewing gum is illegal.
Kenya has banned the plastic bag.
And in Switzerland, if you get a guinea pig,
you actually need to get two
because they get lonely and they need a friend.
I've made videos about weird and interesting
legal topics myself,
about a multi-billion dollar legal case
to find out whether Pringles are really potato crisps,
and a video exploring this Australian biscuit
that's illegal to call a cookie.
And that gets to one of the issues.
I spent five minutes and 50 seconds on this one topic,
giving you the origin and the backstory of the biscuit,
explaining the law, where it came from,
and what it means today.
And even my summary is an incredibly shortened version
of an entire book on the topic.
And that's the thing,
if you're getting information in listicle format,
it's not gonna be the full story,
which leads us to the next issue.
And if ever there was a fact
that sums up the weird law genre,
it'd be this one.
In England and Scotland,
it's illegal to handle a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
And here's a VICE video that kind of sums up
how this is normally shown.
- You know, there's a law where it's illegal
to handle a salmon suspiciously.
(lively drumming music)
I've got the salmon.
Now I have to act suspiciously with it.
- So an article might read something like this.
"Thanks to the Salmon Act of 1986, yep, it's a real law,
"it's illegal to hold a salmon suspiciously.
"It begs the question.
"How do you hold a salmon suspiciously?"
And this is one of the few places
where they actually do give their source,
the 1986 Salmon Act, which is real.
But if you go there it answers that question.
When it talks about suspicious circumstances,
what it means is selling and trading
in illegally fished salmon.
It's got nothing to do with holding a fish.
And I think this misreading of the law,
whether it's done accidentally or on purpose
is a big place where these weird laws come from.
So how wrong are these articles?
In short, they're pretty bad.
In Australia, news.com.au had a go
at fact checking some of them,
and here's what they found.
"You cannot swim at Brighton Beach, Victoria,
"unless you're covered in head-to-toe bathers".
Well, they spoke to the Brighton City Council
and no, not true. It may never have been.
"It is illegal to change your own light bulb in Victoria".
Now it is true that in Victoria,
you can't do your own wiring.
If you want to kind of rewire your house,
you have to get a certified electrician to do it,
but not only is it okay to change your own light bulbs,
it explicitly says it in the law
that this is something which is okay
for normal people to do.
"In Australia, it's illegal to walk
"on the right-hand side of the road".
Now, not only is this not true at all,
but in case there is no footpath.
The right-hand side is actually
where you are meant to walk.
So it's very false.
And on it goes.
In the UK, the Law Commission,
which is a government organization,
has gotten so many questions about this,
that they've made a bit of their own fact sheet.
So here's a quick fire round of increasingly bizarre laws.
"London black cabs must carry a bale of hay". No.
"It's illegal not to carry out two hours
"of longbow practice per week". No.
"It's illegal to place a stamp
"of the queen upside down". No.
"It is legal for a pregnant woman to relieve herself
"anywhere, including in a policeman's helmet". No.
"It is legal to shoot a Welshman with a longbow on Sunday,
"in the Cathedral Close in Hereford,
"or inside the walls of Chester after midnight,
"or a Scotsman within the walls of York,
"other than on a Sunday". No.
Adding that, "it is illegal to shoot a Welsh or Scottish
"or any person regardless of the day,
"location or choice of weaponry."
But I do think it's funny that a member
of the Law Commission had to spend time
putting in some responses to these.
Now I'll include a link and you can check it out,
of all these debunked laws
and a couple in there that do have some merit.
I think a lot of people have this idea
that there are a lot of archaic laws on the books,
and maybe that's more true in places like the UK,
but it doesn't seem very true here in Australia.
Someone asked the Law Society President
of South Australia about it,
and he just said there was very unlikely
to be many bizarre laws still in effect.
What he thought was more common
was archaic wordings of laws that are official.
Try to decipher this one.
So my advice would be, if you see these articles,
you can pretty much disregard anything that's on them,
which does lead us to our next question.
So if they're so universally wrong,
why do they exist at all?
And the thing is, is they're giving you information,
which would be pretty useless
even if what was in it was true.
So what are they for?
It's certainly not to provide legal advice.
Something I found that was interesting
while I was researching this,
is one of the places that these things most appear,
is on the blogs and websites of law firms.
Now, lawyers would be able to read this and say,
well, this is almost certainly not true.
So what's going on?
Well, I think the reason is that
lawyers aren't reading this,
even though it's on their own website,
because the people that run the website
are different than the lawyers themselves,
and their goal is to get ranked higher on Google.
And that can come about through content, and through links.
So a lot of this kind of churned articles
what comes together.
And the other place you'll find
these kinds of articles are on news sites,
particularly those online that are hungry for information,
always needing more content and more clicks.
And this is pretty catchy.
It's a listicle, it's got a very click-baity title,
and it's something that people might be interested in.
'Cause anything that's given in listicle format
is not a piece of legal scholarship.
As I've shown, the vast majority
of these articles are wrong.
But if you did want to live in a world
that is generally misleading, but technically correct,
here is a guide for creating your own dumb laws.
Step one is to choose an existing law.
For example, in Victoria, my home state,
you can't cross the road if you've got a red light.
Step two is where the magic happens.
Add specifics, the weirder the better.
You could give it a specific city name,
you could say that it happens on a full moon,
and why walk across the street when you could do a dance.
And step three is frame it as a fun fact.
Did you know that in Victoria, Australia,
you can't cross the road during a full moon,
while carrying a pig, while dancing an Irish jig,
while the light is red.
How crazy is that?
Technically true and utterly useless.
Which could, to be fair, be a tagline for this channel.
As I said, I've made different videos about weird laws,
for example, why doorknobs are illegal
in different parts of Australia and Canada,
and the law that accidentally created
Australia's biggest birthday. So check them out.
Fun fact, it would be illegal not to.
I'm Julian O'Shea, take care.