Weird laws in the United States are a mix of two things: genuine statutes that still sit in state codes and municipal ordinances because nobody bothered to repeal them, and viral claims that were exaggerated, misattributed, or invented outright. Telling the two apart comes down to one habit: if a claim doesn’t come with a statute number you can look up, treat it as rumor until proven otherwise.
How to Tell a Real Weird Law from a Myth
The internet rewards surprise, and nobody fact-checks a claim that sounds funny. That’s why so many “it’s illegal to…” lists repeat the same unverifiable items year after year. A few patterns show up again and again.
Some claims pin a real statute number to fake content. A popular one holds that Virginia Code § 18.2-388 bans profane or obscene language in public. That section exists, but it addresses public intoxication and says nothing about profanity.1Virginia Code Commission. Virginia Code 18.2-388 – Intoxication in Public; Penalty The profanity claim likely drifted from a different, older Virginia ordinance and attached itself to the wrong citation as it circulated.
Other claims take a real law and strip the context out of it. Little Rock, Arkansas is often said to have banned flirting. There was a 1918 ordinance, but it prohibited staring, winking, or whistling at passersby with the intent to solicit prostitution. It was an anti-solicitation measure, not a ban on romance, and it is no longer on the books.
A third pattern is pure invention. The widely shared claim that Alaska makes it illegal to give alcohol to a moose has no basis in the state’s wildlife regulations.2Alaska Administrative Code. 5 AAC 92.029 – Permit for Possessing Live Game The story appears to grow from a Fairbanks anecdote nobody can trace to an actual statute. The claim that it’s illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole, variously attributed to Atlanta and other cities, is in the same category: no one has produced the ordinance text.
The practical rule for a reader: a real weird law has a jurisdiction, a code section, and language you can read for yourself. Everything else is a story.
Weird Laws That Are Actually Real
Alaska’s Live Game Permit
Under Alaska’s administrative code, you can’t possess, import, or export live game without a permit from the Department of Fish and Game. The regulation flatly prohibits keeping game animals as pets, with one carve-out: people who already owned a chimpanzee before January 2010 were allowed to keep theirs.2Alaska Administrative Code. 5 AAC 92.029 – Permit for Possessing Live Game A grandfather clause written for a single species tells you someone in Alaska had a chimpanzee and the state had to decide what to do.
Wisconsin’s Margarine Rules
Wisconsin’s dairy industry fought margarine through the legislature for decades. The state banned yellow-colored margarine in 1895 to prevent confusion with butter, and that color ban held until 1967. The restrictions didn’t vanish, though. Wisconsin law still prohibits restaurants from serving margarine as a butter substitute unless the customer specifically requests it.3Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 97.18 – Oleomargarine Regulations State institutions like hospitals and prisons face tighter rules, allowing substitution only on a doctor’s order for a specific patient. The maximum penalty for a first violation is a $500 fine and three months in jail.
Carmel’s High-Heel Permit
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California requires a permit to wear shoes with heels higher than two inches and a base smaller than one square inch on public streets and sidewalks.4City of Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA. Carmel-by-the-Sea Municipal Code Chapter 8.44 – Permits for Wearing Certain Shoes The city attorney drafted the ordinance in 1963 after people kept tripping on sidewalks warped by tree roots, and the permit functions as a liability waiver. It’s free at City Hall.5Carmel-by-the-Sea. Permit Required to Wear High Heels Police don’t cite anyone, but the tree roots haven’t gone anywhere, so the ordinance stays.
Gainesville’s Fried Chicken Ordinance
Gainesville, Georgia adopted an ordinance in 1961 making it illegal to eat fried chicken with a fork. City officials have never pretended it was anything other than a publicity stunt tied to the city’s identity as a poultry capital. It isn’t enforced, and it still generates press coverage decades later, which was the point.
Boulder’s Upholstered Furniture Ban
Boulder, Colorado prohibits placing upholstered furniture outdoors, including on front porches and in yards. The rule targets couches, stuffed chairs, and mattresses, mainly as a fire safety measure in a city surrounded by dry foothills and subject to high winds. It also addresses pests. College towns across the country have adopted similar bans after porch-couch fires at large gatherings got out of hand.
Sunday Alcohol Restrictions
Blue laws restricting Sunday commerce trace back to colonial Virginia, which in 1617 required church attendance and authorized the militia to enforce it. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that Sunday restrictions aren’t automatically unconstitutional as long as they serve a secular purpose like providing a uniform day of rest. Many states still restrict when and where alcohol can be sold on Sundays, sometimes prohibiting sales before noon or limiting them to certain store types. Penalties for businesses range from fines to liquor license suspension. Some counties remain completely dry under local-option laws.
Anti-Mask Laws
Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. have laws limiting face coverings in public. Most originally targeted people concealing their identity while committing crimes or intimidating others. They generally fall into three categories: blanket bans with listed exceptions, bans on masking with criminal intent, and bans on masking during the commission of a crime. After several states repealed or suspended these restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, new versions passed in 2024 and 2025 aimed at protests and campus demonstrations. The newer statutes raise First Amendment questions, since they can reach people who cover their faces for health, religious, or privacy reasons, and they are actively being litigated.
Why These Laws Stay on the Books
Repealing a law takes the same legislative effort as passing one. Someone has to draft the bill, move it through committee, and secure a majority in both chambers. For a city ordinance, the council has to put it on the agenda, hold a hearing, and vote. Elected officials rarely spend political capital on rules nobody enforces when they could be working on housing, crime, or infrastructure. And there’s a real downside to trying: a vote to repeal an unused law invites a misleading headline about a politician who “voted to legalize” some absurd activity.
The legal doctrine of desuetude holds that courts should be able to strike down statutes that have fallen into complete disuse. American courts reject it. The prevailing rule is that non-enforcement alone doesn’t give a court the power to nullify a statute. A law remains valid until the legislature repeals it or a court strikes it down on constitutional grounds. That’s how century-old ordinances end up sitting next to modern regulations in the same municipal code.
Why They’re Almost Never Enforced
Even when a weird law stays in the code, modern constitutional doctrine usually prevents it from being used. Two cases do most of the work.
In Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972), the Supreme Court struck down a vagrancy ordinance for being too vague to give fair notice of what was prohibited, for encouraging arbitrary arrests, and for criminalizing conduct that modern standards treat as innocent.6Legal Information Institute. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville The ruling effectively killed a whole category of vague public-nuisance laws and remains the standard courts apply.
In Cohen v. California (1971), the Court held that a state cannot make the public display of an expletive a criminal offense without a specific and compelling justification.7Justia US Supreme Court. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 Profanity is generally protected speech now, with a narrow exception for “fighting words” directed at a specific person in a way reasonably expected to provoke immediate violence. That’s all that remains of the broad public-decency statutes that once filled municipal codes.
These doctrines are why prosecutors don’t charge people under century-old conduct ordinances. Any competent defense attorney would get the charge thrown out. The laws survive because nobody challenges dead letters, and nobody repeals laws that aren’t causing problems.
How Outdated Laws Get Removed
The most common path is a formal repeal through the same legislative process that created the law. At the municipal level, a citizen petition can sometimes force the issue. The typical process requires residents to draft the repeal in proper legal form, gather signatures from a set percentage of registered voters (often around five percent), and submit the petition with sworn affidavits verifying each signature. If the petition clears the threshold, the governing body has to take it up.
Some states have created law revision commissions to comb through the code and flag obsolete provisions for repeal. Massachusetts, for one, has cleared batches of colonial-era statutes through omnibus cleanup bills. The work is slow and unglamorous, which is part of why so many weird laws linger. Most of them will die through constitutional obsolescence long before they’re formally repealed, sitting in the code the way old wallpaper sits under fresh paint: technically still there, no longer doing anything.