9 Weird Laws That Are Still on the Books

Every few months a list of the world’s most insane laws does the rounds, and most of it is fiction. The Law Commission of England and Wales, a real government body whose job includes deleting dead statutes, keeps a public page explaining that no, you may not shoot a Welshman with a longbow, on any day, for any reason. That such a page has to exist is the funniest fact here.

So we read the statutes instead. We have spent this year reviewing products that should not exist and objects nobody asked for, so a morning with the statute book felt restful. Nine laws with a citation and a pulse, then three famous fakes taken apart. Without further ado.

1. Handling salmon in suspicious circumstances (United Kingdom)

Section 32 of the Salmon Act 1986 carries the marginal heading “Handling salmon in suspicious circumstances,” which has launched a thousand pub arguments about being arrested for looking shifty near a fish.

The heading is doing all the comedy. The section makes it an offence to receive a fish, or to help retain, remove or dispose of one, when you believe or ought reasonably to suspect it was illegally taken. A handling-stolen-goods law with fins. Since the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 amended it, the offence covers salmon, trout, eels, lampreys, smelt and freshwater fish, and you can read it in ninety seconds.

It gets used, too. In 2024 a man in Wales pleaded guilty to three breaches of catch-and-release rules and one count of handling salmon in suspicious circumstances, after officers found the fish stuffed up his sleeve. He paid a £414 fine, £2,000 in costs and a £166 victim surcharge. Total damage: £2,580.

2. Chewing gum is contraband in Singapore

The ban took effect on 3 January 1992, announced in The Straits Times four days earlier, and the trigger was infrastructure. Vandals had been pressing gum onto the door sensors of Mass Rapid Transit trains, which stopped the doors closing, which stopped the trains.

Why it’s weird: the ban lands on commerce. You can chew gum in Singapore all day. Importing, making or selling it is what costs you money. Gum litter reportedly fell from about 525 cases a day to two a day by February 1993. Since 2004 therapeutic, dental and nicotine gum has been available from a doctor or pharmacist, who must record who bought it.

3. A guinea pig must have a guinea pig (Switzerland)

The Swiss Animal Welfare Ordinance, in force since 2008, requires that social species be kept with company of their own kind. Guinea pigs are squarely on that list, which makes owning exactly one of them unlawful.

When one guinea pig in a pair dies, the survivor cannot lawfully be left alone, so owners buy a replacement, rehome the widow into an existing group, or rent a stand-in from one of the businesses that exist for this. There is a rental market in temporary guinea pigs. Animal welfare law created it.

4. Dying is forbidden in Falciano del Massico (Italy)

In March 2012 Mayor Giulio Cesare Fava of Falciano del Massico, in Campania, signed an ordinance forbidding residents and anybody passing through to cross the boundary of earthly life. The town’s cemetery was full. When Falciano gained independence from Carinola in 1964, nobody noticed the new comune had been left with no burial ground of its own, which sent the dead to neighbouring Mondragone at a much higher price per plot.

Two elderly residents died within weeks of the order. Enforcement, you will be stunned to learn, proved difficult. Sellia in Calabria went further in 2015 by banning falling ill, paired with a local health tax discount for anybody attending a check-up.

5. Kinder Surprise eggs are federal contraband (United States)

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 deems a confection adulterated if a non-nutritive object is embedded in it. A plastic capsule holding a tiny plastic giraffe is a non-nutritive object. So the Kinder Surprise egg, sold without incident across most of the planet, is an illegal import into the United States.

Customs and Border Protection counts more than 3,000 seizures since 2010, pulled from mail facilities, freight and the luggage of travellers running chocolate over the border like a very small-stakes Ocean’s Eleven. Fines of up to $2,500 per egg have been quoted. Kinder Joy, whose toy sits in a sealed second compartment, sells in American supermarkets untroubled.

6. Your baby’s name needs committee approval (Iceland)

Iceland’s Naming Committee has existed since 1991 and operates under the Personal Names Act No. 45 of 1996. A given name must use only letters of the Icelandic alphabet, must decline properly through Icelandic grammatical cases, and must sit inside Icelandic tradition. The approved register holds roughly 4,300 names.

The committee rejects, and occasionally the courts overrule it. Blær Bjarkardóttir Rúnarsdóttir spent the first fifteen years of her life registered as “Stúlka,” the Icelandic word for girl, because the committee had filed Blær as masculine. A Reykjavík district court threw that out on 31 January 2013 and the government declined to appeal. A proposal to abolish the committee reached parliament in 2020, got one debate, and has sat still since.

7. You may not fly a kite in a London street (England)

Section 54 of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 is a long list of thoroughfare nuisances, much of it repealed. Subsection 17 survives. It catches “every person who shall fly any kite or play at any game to the annoyance of the inhabitants or passengers, or who shall make or use any slide upon ice or snow in any street or other thoroughfare, to the common danger of the passengers.”

The penalty is level 2 on the standard scale, currently £500 at most. Note the qualifiers, because they keep the section enforceable. The kite has to annoy somebody. The ice slide has to endanger somebody. A quiet kite on Parliament Hill is fine, and a chute of packed snow down a busy high street is a different conversation.

8. There is a legal ceiling on paying in coins (Canada)

Section 8 of Canada’s Currency Act sets out how much of a payment can be made in coin before it stops counting as legal tender. Forty dollars in coins of two to ten dollars. Twenty-five dollars in loonies. Ten dollars in coins from ten cents up to a dollar. Five dollars in nickels. Twenty-five cents in pennies.

The Act also aggregates the amounts, so sums owed by one person to another on the same day count as one debt against the ceiling, closing the loophole of settling a big bill in many tiny ones. Canada stopped distributing the one cent coin in February 2013 and the penny ceiling sits in the statute regardless.

9. Margarine has rules in Wisconsin

Wisconsin was the last American state to repeal its ban on selling yellow margarine, in 1967. The dairy interests did not go quietly, and section 97.18 of the state statutes still governs what a restaurant may put on your table.

A public eating place may not serve margarine as a substitute for table butter unless the customer asks for it. Penalties run from $100 to $500 with up to three months in jail, rising to $500 through $1,000 and six months to a year for repeat offenders. Students, patients and inmates at state institutions get margarine only when the superintendent orders it for a health reason.

The three that are not real

Shooting a Welshman with a longbow. The Law Commission addressed this head on: “It is illegal to shoot a Welsh or Scottish (or any other) person regardless of the day, location or choice of weaponry.” The nearest thing to a source is a supposed 1403 Chester curfew on Welshmen during the Glyndŵr Rising, which never mentions archery.

Dying in the Houses of Parliament. This topped a 2007 poll of Britain’s most ludicrous laws, a remarkable result for a law that has never existed. The story runs that dying in the Palace entitles you to a state funeral, so the expense was outlawed. The Law Commission’s repeals team found four recorded deaths in Parliament, one of them in the whole twentieth century, and Alfred Billson, who died in 1907 while voting, got no state funeral.

Eating a mince pie on Christmas Day. Parliament under Cromwell really did legislate against Christmas feasting in the 1640s, ordering 25 December kept as a fast day. Every Interregnum ordinance lost force at the Restoration in 1660, because none of it had royal assent. Your mince pie has been lawful since 1660.