It’s easy to think of the law as something very serious and perfectly rational. After all, it’s handled by important institutions and meant to keep society running in order. But as it turns out, it’s not always as sensible as it seems.
We’ve gathered some truly unusual laws from around the world, and let’s just say they’re not what you’d expect. We had a hard time wrapping our heads around quite a few of them. Scroll down to check out the list and upvote the ones that surprised you the most!
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Some of these laws are truly silly and weird and will definitely make you laugh reading them. Like the fact that there’s a place out there where it’s illegal to forget your wife’s birthday (although maybe that’s actually a good rule and we should have it everywhere).
Others though, while they raise a few eyebrows, are pretty serious. In India, for example, you can’t find out the gender of your baby before it’s born, for pretty dark reasons.
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But regardless of how funny or serious they are, all of them have an explanation behind them. It just doesn’t always translate well to modern times.
Take the UK, for example. It’s a country with a very long history and one that’s famous for its formalities and peculiar traditions. So naturally, if we go far enough back, we’re bound to find some very strange laws. It’s just that, well, many of them have remained on the books, even if most people don’t know they technically exist.
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As it turns out, there’s a law in the UK where MPs are prohibited from wearing armor in parliament. No one really wears armor these days anyway, right? But as The Guardian notes, it was established by the Bearing of Armour Act, which dates all the way back to 1313.
It was an attempt by Edward II to prevent nobles from threatening to use force when parliament was called. The Earl of Lancaster, apparently, still attended parliament carrying weapons until at least 1319.
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Some other unusual regulations in the UK include a part of the 1872 Licensing Act that outlaws being drunk in charge of cattle (so watch yourself after a few pints on the farm).
Then there’s the 1986 Salmon Act, which was intended to ban poaching but somehow makes it illegal to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances. Whatever that means. There’s also a 19th-century law banning the beating of carpets after 8am on streets in London.
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Of course, it’s widely recognized that some of these old laws are ridiculous. That’s why the UK has The Law Commission, which is responsible for regularly recommending the removal of outdated regulations.
The Unlawful Games Act 1541, for instance, required every Englishman aged between 17 and 60 to keep a longbow and practice archery on a regular basis. It wasn’t repealed until 1960.
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In some countries though, the laws that were enforced a while ago are still very much in use, and it doesn’t look like they plan on changing them anytime soon.
You may have heard that in Singapore it’s illegal to sell gum. Sounds a bit absurd, but no, it’s not because it’ll be stuck in your body for seven years after you swallow it, as we were all told as kids.
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Apparently, chewing gum was causing maintenance problems all over the place. In apartment buildings, vandals were disposing of spent gum in mailboxes, inside keyholes, and on elevator buttons.
Gum left on the ground, stairways, and pavements in public areas was driving up cleaning costs and damaging equipment. Even the seats on public buses weren’t safe from it.
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So it was banned in 1992. Since 2004 though, an exception has been made for therapeutic, dental, and nicotine chewing gum, which can be bought from a doctor or registered pharmacist.
It’s worth noting that it’s not actually illegal to chew gum in Singapore. It’s just against the law to import and sell it, apart from the exceptions mentioned above.
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And there we are. Whether you think these rules are too drastic or too silly, it doesn’t change the fact that they existed at one point or still do now.
If anything, it reflects us as a society pretty well. We can be pretty unreasonable, and naturally, we need equally unreasonable laws to keep us in check.
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