The stupidest laws in the US are mostly myths. The handful that are real — a Carmel-by-the-Sea high-heel permit, an Idaho cannibalism statute with a survival exception, Colorado rules capping how much rainwater you can collect — tend to have straightforward reasons behind them and survive because no legislator sees a payoff in cleaning them up. The genuinely absurd-sounding ones you’ve probably heard, like bouncing pickles in Connecticut or a Baltimore ban on lions in movie theaters, cannot be traced to any actual code section.
Weird Laws That Are Actually Real
A short list of oddities does hold up when you check the statute.
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California prohibits wearing shoes with heels taller than two inches and less than one square inch of bearing surface on public streets, unless you first get a free permit from City Hall. The ordinance sits in Chapter 8.44 of the municipal code, and the city openly acknowledges it. The point is liability: the permit releases the city if someone trips on the town’s famously uneven pavement.
Idaho has an explicit statute banning cannibalism, with a carved-out exception for survival situations where consuming human flesh is “the only apparent means” of staying alive. Few other states have put cannibalism in the criminal code at all, which is what makes Idaho’s version notable.
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission regulations restrict the taking of alligators. The rule is popularly summarized as a ban on keeping an alligator in a bathtub, but the actual regulation is broader than that framing.
Alabama is often cited for a law banning carrying an ice cream cone in your back pocket, with a horse-theft rationale: a thief could lure a horse away using the treat without technically “taking” it. The story has been repeated for more than a century, and similar versions turn up in several states, but no one has reliably produced the statutory text. That makes the ice cream cone a useful warning: even some of the “real” weird laws live in a gray zone between verified code and local legend.
The Famous Ones That Aren’t Real
Most lists of absurd American laws recycle claims that fall apart under checking. A 2018 analysis by Marquette University Law School concluded that many reported “dumb laws” are misreadings of what statutes actually say, and others are inventions that have never existed in any legal code. The University of Connecticut Law Library specifically investigated the famous rule that Connecticut requires pickles to bounce before they can be sold and confirmed it is a myth with no basis in state food law. The Library of Congress has traced the broader pattern to viral websites that openly concede their listed laws “have no legal references, and therefore could be erroneous.”
A few of the most repeated claims collapse the moment you look for a citation:
- It is illegal to eat in a burning building in Chicago. No such provision appears in the city’s fire prevention code or municipal ordinances.
- Baltimore bans taking a lion to the movies. No verifiable city code section supports it.
- Oklahoma jails people for making ugly faces at dogs. No one has ever produced the statute.
These stories spread because someone paraphrases a broad regulation or an old court order into a punchy one-liner, and each website copies the last until the claim feels authoritative.
The Weird Laws That Actually Affect People
The strangest-sounding American laws tend to be harmless curiosities. The ones that matter in daily life are different: they look reasonable in isolation and genuinely restrict ordinary behavior.
Sunday closing laws, usually called blue laws, are the biggest category. Texas prohibits Sunday liquor sales. Indiana and several other states restrict Sunday car dealership sales, so dealers have to pick which weekend day to close. Certain Bergen County, New Jersey municipalities go further and ban Sunday sales of clothing, furniture, and electronics. North Carolina prohibits gun hunting on Sundays. These rules originally enforced religious observance, and they survived constitutional challenge because the Supreme Court, in McGowan v. Maryland (1961), accepted that even laws with “overtly religious origins” could be justified as a secular uniform day of rest.1Justia US Supreme Court. McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) They carry real fines and are applied every week.
Zoning codes produce another set of rules that sound absurd on first contact. Several university towns, including Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Oxford, Ohio, prohibit keeping upholstered indoor furniture on outdoor porches. The reasoning is fire prevention; abandoned couches become fuel during block parties and post-game celebrations. Fines can reach $1,000, which is why landlords near college campuses often write furniture restrictions directly into leases.
Many cities also cap the number of unrelated people who can share a single dwelling, often at two or three, while placing no limit on related occupants. The Supreme Court upheld this kind of ordinance in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas (1974), treating it as ordinary land-use regulation. For roommates, co-living groups, and students splitting rent, the practical effect is that affordable arrangements can be technically illegal.
Even newer rules can look strange without context. Colorado limits residential rainwater collection to 110 gallons, stored in no more than two 55-gallon barrels, and only for outdoor non-potable use on the property where it falls. Utah caps collection at 2,500 gallons and requires registration above 100 gallons. The logic involves western water rights: under prior appropriation doctrine, rain landing on your roof is already somebody else’s downstream water supply. Reasonable or not, telling a homeowner they can only keep two barrels of rain still strikes most people as ridiculous.
Why Outdated Laws Stay on the Books
Repealing a law costs time and political capital. Ignoring one costs nothing. Legislative bodies have limited session days and crowded agendas, and drafting a repeal bill, moving it through committee, scheduling floor votes, and sending it to the governor takes the same procedural work whether the target is a dangerous statute or a forgotten ordinance about ice cream cones. Few legislators see a political reward in announcing they spent a committee hearing on a law nobody has enforced since 1912.
Municipal codes are harder still. A mid-sized city may carry thousands of pages of ordinances built up over a century, and most local governments lack the staff to audit them. Unless a resident complains, a developer hits a snag, or a reporter writes a story, nobody reads these provisions. They sit there inert, technically enforceable but functionally invisible. Some states run code revision commissions that flag obsolete provisions for repeal, but the process is slow and rarely reaches municipal codes.
How an Absurd Law Can Actually Get Removed
Jaywalking is the clearest recent example of an outdated law being struck rather than ignored. The term dates to around 1911, with “jay” as Midwestern slang for an idiot, and by the 1920s the auto industry had promoted the concept aggressively to shift blame for pedestrian deaths from drivers to walkers. In 2021, Kansas City became the first major U.S. city to strike its jaywalking ban from the code entirely. The catalyst was enforcement data: Black residents, less than 30 percent of the population, were receiving 65 percent of the tickets. Virginia had already downgraded jaywalking to a secondary offense, and California, Nevada, Denver, and New York City have since decriminalized it.
When an outdated law is enforced against someone, two constitutional doctrines do most of the work in court. The void-for-vagueness doctrine, grounded in the Due Process Clauses, requires criminal laws to define banned conduct clearly enough that an ordinary person can understand them and that police cannot enforce them based on personal preference.2EveryCRSReport.com. The Void-for-Vagueness Doctrine in Criminal Law A ban on “making faces at dogs” has no objective standard and would be an obvious target. Section 1983 claims let individuals sue state or local governments for enforcing laws that violate constitutional rights, with attorney fees available to prevailing plaintiffs.
The catch is that courts generally decline to rule on a law’s constitutionality unless someone has actually been harmed by its enforcement. Nobody enforces the strangest ordinances, so nobody has standing to challenge them, so they stay on the books. That loop is the real reason the stupidest laws in the US keep showing up on lists year after year.