World of the Bizarre

UK moves to prune backlog of ridiculous laws

By T.K. Randall
December 19, 2015 ·  9 comments

The UK still maintains some rather antiquated laws. Image Credit: CC BY 3.0 Joseph Plotz The United Kingdom has accumulated rather a lot of laws over the centuries and many of them, having been devised hundreds of years ago, are now so redundant that they are laughable.

Examples of this include the fact that it is still illegal to fire a cannon within 300 yards of someone's house or to beat a carpet in the street unless it is done before 8am in the morning.

There are so many ridiculous and outdated laws in fact that the government has a a whole team of officials working behind the scenes to go through them all and prune out the useless ones.Other examples of nonsensical laws that still exist in the UK include:

• Since 1939 it has been illegal to carry a plank of wood down the street
• It is illegal to 'handle a salmon under suspicious circumstances'
• It is considered illegal to use obscene language inside a library
• When walking down the street it is illegal to slide on ice or snow
• It is illegal to die inside the Houses of Parliament

In total there are believed to be more than 44,000 pieces of primary legislation to process.

"To have a legal situation where there is so much information that you cannot sit down and comprehend it, does seem to me a serious problem," said legal historian Andrew Lewis.

"I think it matters dreadfully that no one can get a handle on the whole of it."

Source: New York Times | Comments (9)

Tags: United Kingdom, Laws