Sometimes a great notion strikes two publishers at once. Susan Savoca Twarog`s new book informs us that Oregon forbids hunting in cemeteries, Arkansas bans mining in cemeteries and New York makes it a misdemeanor to arrest dead people. Dick Hyman`s new treatise reports that California forbids sleeping in a kitchen, permits cooking in a bedroom and comes down hard on dogs that bother cashmere goats.
What both books happily share is utter contempt of court. Hyman`s ”The Columbus Chicken Statute and More Bonehead Legislation” (Stephen Greene Press, $4.95) and Twarog`s ”A Compendium of Odd Laws” (Applewood Books, $4.95) both breezily reject the noble definitions of law imposed on generations of obeisant students. Far from viewing law as a brooding omnipresence in the sky, Hyman and Twarog consider it a bumbling clodhopper on earth. Unwilling to accept it as the apex of man`s reason, they regard it as proof of the featherless biped`s basic dottiness. You`ve heard of higher law. This is lower law–the worst and the dumbest.
Hyman takes the title of his collection from the city code of Columbus, Ga., which makes it a crime to let a chicken`s head dangle. The examples get worse.
Some laws plainly seek to ruin the competition. A Tucson ordinance makes it ”unlawful for any visiting football team or player to carry, convey, tote, kick, throw, pass or otherwise transport or propel any inflated pigskin across the University of Arizona goal line.” The state`s legal majesty, in other words, was pulled into the service of sic semper Wildcats.
Some statutes have verged on literary criticism. An 1859 Georgia law forbade ”love matches” on the principle that they existed only in the imagination of novelists. Other rules get just a mite too legal. In Kellogg, Idaho, it`s illegal to escape from jail ”without authority of the keeper.”
Some states and cities seem to possess, shall we say, more than the usual talent for this kind of lawslinging. California naturally racks up four pages; it once mandated the licensing of tricycles. But Little Rock, Ark., gives it a run for its gavel. An ordinance there, according to Hyman, forbids dogs from barking after 6 p.m. An older ordinance imposes a fine for public flirting.
Are we Americans a legally imbecilic people? Jingoists and international lawyers will be pleased to hear that legal idiocy knows no national boundaries. Fans of the recent Maggie Smith movie, ”A Private Function,”
should be heartened to learn that an English pig may travel on British Rail if accompanied by a passenger and ticket. British Columbia bans camels from the road; wardens in Sydney, Australia, must make their nightly rounds in bedroom slippers, and you can`t kill bedbugs on a rainy day in Mexico. Yugoslavia, that ”most favored” nation of the Eastern Bloc, takes a protectionist stance toward the heavens, forbidding Halley`s Comet from appearing over that country.
Hyman, a longtime journalist, attempts to explain how some of these riot acts got on the books (Twarog, a former Harvard law student, mainly records them). He points out that many of the nuttiest laws remain from archaic times, and busy legislatures don`t bother to repeal them. He also explains that a common legislative gambit for killing undesirable bills is to append a ridiculous rider. When those bills go through anyway, the riders sometimes go with them.
Hyman draws no conclusions. But there is, you`ll be sorry to hear, a serious side to all this. The loony laws suggest it, yet so do such feats as Indiana`s 1924 conviction of a monkey for smoking a cigarette, and the following gem of legislative drafting from Kansas: ”When two trains approach each other at a crossing, both shall come to a full stop and neither shall start up again until the other has gone.”
It is that the law, pace Cicero, hardly ranks as ”right reason, calling us imperiously to our duty, and prohibiting every violation.” That later orator, Charles Dickens` Mr. Bumble, came closer to the mark: ”The law is an ass, an idiot.”
The thought should bother all of us more than it does. When American law students get their smattering of jurisprudence, they learn the difference between legal positivism and natural law. Legal positivists believe that law means nothing more than the rules that legislatures and courts happen to lay down. Natural-law advocates, a la Thomas Aquinas, think that some rules of human behavior count as law regardless of what human legal institutions lay down–fundamental laws outrank and transcend them. Legal positivists, you may know, dominate the American scene.
The stuff trickles out into society, and that`s one reason we get lots of editorial writers who harrumph, on one issue or another, about the importance of obeying the law even when one disagrees with it. We are a nation of laws, not men. Right! We are the nation of the Columbus Chicken Statute. No wonder civil disobedience caught on so fast.
Back in a bootless former life of studying philosophy of law, I made a bone-chilling discovery: The whole field revolved around three books and five examples. In the wisdom of hindsight, I recommend that ”The Columbus Chicken Statute” and Twarog`s ”Odd Compendium” be added to the sacred list, or at least placed on reserve. Our modern, scientific lawyers ought to know that when they sign on with legal positivism, they`re getting more than the imprimataur of Oxford, Harvard and Stanford. They`re getting Title II, Chapter 20, Section 6281 of the Ohio General Code: ”A person assaulted and lynched by a mob may recover, from the county in which such assault is made, a sum not to exceed five hundred dollars.”
