Law Society and Bizarre Legislation
Anyone passing Chancery Lane might wish to pop in to the Law Society to see an exhibition that must have had the legal researchers there busy.
According to a BBC article this is one of those extraordinary exhibitions that make the public wonder whether we’ve collectively taken leave of our senses or inhabit a netherworld of time warped irrelevancy.
They report:
* It is still illegal for anyone to wear armour to Parliament, (Royal Prerogative 1279)
* Hanging washing in the street, beating a carpet and flying a kite are set out in the Town Police Clauses Act, 1847, (chapter 89, section 28) as punishable by a £1,000 fine
* The Licensing Act of 1872 states that it is illegal to be drunk in charge of a cow, horse or steam engine
* You can’t fire a cannon close to a dwelling house (Metropolitan Police Act 1839)
* You can’t bet or gamble in the library reading room (Library Offences Act 1898)
* You can’t use any slide upon ice or snow (Town Police Clauses Act 1847)
* You can’t drive cattle through the streets of London (Metropolitan Streets Act 1867)
The last two fortunately didn’t make it to Canada or the Quebec toboggan run and the Calgary Stampede would be illegal.
And my librarian colleagues must surely pine for a statute that will permit them to stamp out Texas Hold’Em games within library reading rooms.
It still sounds like a good idea to prohibit these things! I wouldn’t want anyone firing cannons near *my* house. Well, unless that would scare away the raccoons.
Thanks for providing several more pieces of evidence that statutes don’t repeal themselves. However obvious it is that they should be repealed, they stay on the books until the Legislature or Parliament gets around to killing them. But persuade a government House Leader that legislative time should be devoted to e.g. repealing a statute that prohibits wearing armour to Parliament, or even gambling in a library … good luck! No doubt these ones managed to hide in the statutory nooks or crannies when the occasional omnibus clean-up Acts were being assembled…
In Ontario, the Legislation Act (Access to Justice Act, Bill 14, Schedule F) at least allows the LG in Council to revoke obsolete regulations, or regulations made under repealed statutes. But the statutes themselves have to await the legislators.
I might add that it is sometimes very hard to tell whether an old statute can safely be repealed. The Legislation Act also repeals several hundred old (unconsolidated, unrepealed) Ontario statutes, but several hundred others survived the purge because of doubt. It is even harder to get House time to go into an old but still partly useful statute and kill the unnecessary provisions, which is where I suspect some of the items in the above list were found.
Actually John there is even more institutional inertia. I remember as a young lawyer, responding to a request from federal Justice to assist in identifying statutory provisions that were spent.
I found one that provided for education for the children of soldiers who had been killed in the Boer War. Surely that’s spent, I thought. Only to be told that the Minister of Veterans Affairs could not appear to be countenancing the removal of benefits for the families of the fallen.
Haven’t checked but it’s likely still on the books.