There is nothing new about outdated laws. They can go back to the 1200s in England. And in modern contexts they might seem like Loony Laws. Take the one about being prohibited from wearing a suit of armor in Parliament. There is no real mention that that one is being removed from the books. The online headline implies its removal, but the story doesn't further confirm that.
The little I've seen of the way discourse that takes place in Parliament I'm not surprised that at some point someone probably came in with a suit of armor in order to thwart the onslaught of invective aimed at them. How better to have them suffer the "slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune" than to have them unprotected by a suit of armor? Everything in England gets back to the Bard.
As you might expect, the effort currently going on in England is scholarly. There is of course a committee, Britain's Law Commission, consisting of two lawyers and a researcher. And as much as they sift through the 44,000 pieces of rules, they also debunk those that have become urban legend.
Apparently, there was belief (it is not known if it was a widespread belief) that female store clerks in tropical fish stores in Liverpool were allowed to go topless. Apparently, this is not so. How this came to be believed is unclear. Did someone feel that these clerks were really mermaids, and thus hard to fit for bras? A female in a bait and tackle store would be expected to be clothed, I guess.
London has Piccadilly Square, but only New York has Times Square, where it turns out topless women can roam around, as long as they don't aggressively panhandle.
Late night talk shows have always mined these Loony Local Laws for their humor. There are websites devoted to them. Garlic and body odor play into a good number of them. And they should. Anyone who has shared a subway pole with someone who has just gargled with garlic, or used litchi nut tooth paste would appreciate being able to "Smell Something, Say Something" and bring the offending passenger to the attention of someone in uniform.
For decades now we have gone to a certain section of Vermont that lies roughly south of Middlebury College on Route 30, the Seth Warner Memorial Highway. Seth is another story, but taking Vermont Route 73 west from Route 30 brings you into one of the quintessential Vermont towns, Orwell.
Orwell is tiny, but it does have the clapboard church, a school, a bank, and a general store, Buxton's. Buxton's is like a rural Gristedes, groceries, some hardware and a butcher. Route 73 at that point is a favorite stretch of road for touring bicyclists. They tend to get their energy bars at Buxton's.
Years and years ago I saw one of those tiny blurbs in the New York Daily News about a Loony Law that Orwell, VT had on its books. It struck me that how many people would ever read this little piece in the paper and ever have anything to do with Orwell? We really do live on a Mobius Strip.
Anyway, the Loony Law stated that is was a fine, or some penalty, for being a woman eating garlic at a basketball game.
My thought was that perhaps someone of a garlic persuasion (probably an overzealous Mediterranean) sat behind the coach at a school game at the gym and constantly breathed down the coach's neck. This would have been long before the 9/11 induced message that if you "See Something, Say Something." The response in Orwell to olfactory terrorism was apparently to get something on the books.
Of course I saved the clipping and waited for our next trip to Vermont. I asked someone at the store if they knew anything about the ordinance, but of course no one was old enough to have even remembered any president prior to Jimmy Carter.
I strolled around and pinned the clipping to their community bulletin board and figured I had done enough to alert someone that they might have a law on the books they might want to readdress.
Or maybe enforce.
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