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About Silly Rules
Lists of “weird laws” get passed around constantly, and most never say where the law is. This site only lists a law when we can quote it from the official code and link you to it.
Where the text comes from
Every quote comes from the official online code for its jurisdiction: a state legislature's own statutes website, or the U.S. Code as published on govinfo.gov. We don't use law-firm summaries, news stories, or third-party statute mirrors. The full list of sources is on the states page, and every law page links to its section.
How we check it
- We fetch each official page with an ordinary web browser identity, one page at a time, and save its text.
- Each law has up to four quotes: the rule itself, the penalty and the history note when the same page prints them, and sometimes a second passage from the same section. 158 quotes in all. A script checks each one word for word against the saved page; the only changes it allows are spacing and straight versus curly quotation marks.
- Before each build, we re-fetch the cited pages and check that our quotations still match. This checks quotation accuracy, not whether a provision remains in force, has been amended elsewhere, or is enforceable.
- The finished list is frozen in a versioned data file with a checksum, so nothing on the site changes without a deliberate update.
- We leave out any section the official site marks as repealed, and any “weird law” we can't find in an official code.
What we write versus what we quote
The text inside quotation marks and the official section headings are the legislature's words. The headlines, topics, the “In plain English” readings and the topic overviews are ours, written only from the quoted text and labelled as ours. “History note starts” means the earliest year printed in the cited history note. It does not establish when the featured wording was enacted, became effective, or first appeared.
What we don't do
- We don't give legal advice or say whether a law applies to you.
- We don't research how courts have read these sections, or whether anyone enforces them.
- We don't rank laws or call one sillier than another. They're here because they're real and surprising, not to mock the people who wrote them.
Gaps
Some official code websites wouldn't let us fetch and re-check their text: California's and New York's returned a block page (HTTP 403), Hawaii's showed a security block, Illinois's, Connecticut's, New Hampshire's and Kansas's didn't answer or were refused by our network, and Texas's statutes site now loads its text with JavaScript only. We don't work around blocks, so those states have no laws here yet. Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas publish their free online codes through commercial providers rather than their own sites, so we haven't used them either.
Ads, analytics and privacy
This site shows Google AdSense ads and uses Google Analytics to count visits. The finder runs in your browser and doesn't send your searches anywhere. What the ad and analytics scripts collect is described in the privacy policy.
Who makes it
Silly Rules is published by North Coast AI LLC. It was built with AI assistance and reviewed by Bill Burkey. Found a quote that no longer matches the official page, or a real odd law we should add? Tell us through northcoast.ai with the citation and the official link.
Every quote on this site was matched against its official page on October 14, 2026. Text match only; current legal status and enforcement not verified.