Loophole Abuse / Real Life Law

Examples of Loophole Abuse within real-life legal systems are so numerous we had to split it off into its own separate page.

See also a sports-specific page and the one for general real-life examples.

Multiple

• This is probably the reason why there are so many "dumb laws", like "no pet crocodiles on the street" or "it's illegal to bathe a donkey" for example. Someone abused a loophole, and the city/county/etc. had to implement a law specifically for that loophole that would later seem entirely bizarre or nonsensical to future generations.
• Averted in the Romano-German legal system used in Northern Europe. The text of the law has only secondary importance beyond the legal principles and judicial goods. The judge has very much leeway (the preceding cases aren't binding and the judge has free right to accept or disregard any evidence) and can rule out any attempts of loophole abuse at will.
• Quite possibly the king of this trope in common-law jurisdictions involves various Statutes of Frauds. These laws dictate that certain kinds of agreements and contracts must be evidenced by signed writing in order to be enforceable by courts.^note Generally, contracts in consideration of marriage (e.g. prenups), contracts to be executed over the course of more than one year, contracts for sale of land, contracts in which the executor of a will pays off the estate's debt with his/her own money, contracts for sale of goods valued over a certain sum, and contracts where one part acts as "surety" to a loan, i.e. provides a loan guarantee. Law students call this MY LEGS, since remembering these is a huge pain where the legs connect. Thing is, courts hate the Statute of Frauds since it allows people to weasel their way out of keeping their end of the bargain due to some technicality. As a result, courts have riddled these statutes with exceptions and loopholes, sometimes completely out of whole cloth, in order to enforce promises people have made. This is interesting since this is judges abusing--and creating!--loopholes to keep people (or rather their lawyers) from abusing loopholes that would otherwise exist.
  • An example? One statute that exists everywhere is that contracts covering agreements that will last for more than one year need to be in writing. Does exactly one year count? No. Does a contract lasting for a 'lifetime' count? No. (You could die at any time.) Does a contract that does not specifically state a length of time yet couldn't possibly be completed in one year (e.g. a construction contract for a fairly large project) count? No. (Of course, does this mean that making a contract not in writing for any of this is wise? No!)
• Several legal systems allow judges to effectively say "no loopholes", generally by noting the difference between the letter and the intention or spirit of the law. The most prominent of these is The Common Law, where the doctrine/system of equity developed specifically to address this kind of situation. The system of equity ultimately derives from the tradition of throwing oneself on the King's conscience if you need help—particularly if you had previously lost a suit at law but felt that the outcome was too harsh; the old saying in the legal community is that "equity tempers the rigor of the common law". A large number of equitable doctrines are specifically aimed at situations where the common law would normally let assholes get away with it (for instance, the equitable doctrine that forfeiture—i.e. losing a big investment—allows you to breach an express term has allowed many small businesses to escape from their landlords' attempts to kick them out in favor of someone who will pay a higher rent—since businesses usually put money into modifying a rented space to suit their purposes, they often lose big when forced to leave). As a result, equity allows courts a great deal of flexibility; unlike suits at law, where in general you can only win money damages, suits at equity allow for a variety of other legal remedies that might suit you better. Furthermore, the flexibility of equity allows judges to find ways to punish douchebaggery and other unpleasant behavior in situations where in other systems that might not be possible.
• Seen frequently in fiction, but it does happen in real life: police using various means to get information or confessions without quite violating the accused's rights. The most common one (in jurisdictions where appropriate) is making it clear they are not taking someone into custody or arresting them, therefore not be required to inform them of their rights, specifically the right to have an attorney present. While common in fiction, courts generally take a dim view of this sort of thing if the police are acting like the suspect is in custody, just not doing it officially.
• In some countries the sentence of "life without parole" does not exist, because it's considered a breach of human rights, cruel and unusual punishment, or just forbidden in the constitution or laws of that country. So judges will get around this by sentencing offenders to serve sentences to both the crime and any related offenses consecutively, ending up with a prison sentence the defendant could not possibly survive. For instance, if a criminal shoots two people with a gun in a public street and is found guilty of two counts of murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of endangerment, all of which carry heavy sentences, a judge may sentence them to serve them consecutively, ending up with a sentence of over one hundred years, meaning that they could technically be released one day, but will most likely die in prison.
  • In many jurisdictions (the UK and the US, both by explicit case law, and any signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights), crimes such as assault and endangerment are "lesser included offenses" to the original crime (murder), and obtaining a verdict and sentence separate of the original crime is considered double jeopardy.
  • Averted in Portugal (which has no kind of life or death penalty, and the maximum is 25 years for any individual penalty), which has the so-called cúmulo jurídico das penas, by which the total sum of consecutive penalties is capped at 25 years.
  • Ecuador has the same aversion. Infamously, this led to the release of Pedro Lopez, one of the most prolific serial killers ever recorded, after only 14 years.
  • Also averted in Canada. Sentencing law specifically states that the total term of consecutive sentences must not be "unduly long or harsh." You can't convict a person of an offence and also a lesser included offence for the same conduct. And there used to be a law that multiple first-degree murderers could be sentenced to consecutive terms (the sentence for first-degree murder is life with no possibility of parole for 25 years, and you could stack the parole ineligibility periods to make life without parole for 50, 75, etc. years), but the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that this was unconstitutional.
  • A Thai woman named Chamoy Thipyaso, who ran a pyramid scheme that contained over 16 thousand people, got sentenced to 141,675 years in prison, but the law stated that a person sentenced to fraud served for up to 20 years, and she only served 8.
• In some countries, naturalization protocol can be bypassed, either via executive order, as a matter of national security, via investment in a large swath of property, or in the event that a candidate for citizenship has the potential to bring prestige to the receiving nation (such as an athlete or doctor). Another possible bypass in some countries (with the US a notable example) applies to children under 18 if they are adopted by a citizen of the country, or if one or both parents become citizens while the child is a minor; in those cases, the child becomes a citizen by operation of law.
• Wanna bribe a politician, but don't want to go to jail? Simple! Lobbying. It's been said that there are ten ways to bribe a crooked politician and a hundred ways to bribe an honest one.
• If a law banning prostitution defines it as exchanging sex for money, expect at least some prostitute/pimp/brothel to claim that the sex is free and the client is paying for the room.
  • The legal fiction that makes hardcore pornography legal and not prostitution is that the production team isn't actually paying people to have sex, they are paying people for the right to film, photograph or otherwise record them having sex they presumably were going to have voluntarily anyway.
    • Paying to watch a person live on camera perform sexual acts (usually on themselves) is also legal, because you are paying for the privilege of watching, and the law fails to consider the ability to participate without actually being there in person (by remote controlling the vibrator, for example).
• Patent trolls operate under this trope. There ain't no rule stating that you have to actually use patents you own instead of buying them by the hundreds and living off the license fees extorted with threats of legal action. It's even worse because patents can be so incredibly vague that proving you're not infringing on one can be just as expensive (not to mention time-consuming), even if, in common-sense terms, the troll doesn't have a leg to stand on. Either you pay the troll, or you pay your patent lawyer.
  • Trademark laws function similarly, however you can have the trademark revoked if you are not actively using them within a certain amount of time. What constitutes active usage, however, is another matter entirely...
  • Film rights are also subject to this treatment. A studio might buy film rights to a popular entertainment product with the stipulation that if they're not exercised, they revert to the original owner. But nothing says that "exercising" them can't be defined as a movie made for $500 and the cost of lunch, never intended to see the light of day, specifically in order to hold on to the rights.
• Pyramid schemes, a scheme where people pay money to get in the pyramid, and they get a portion of the money for anybody else they convinced to join in the scheme, are illegal because basic mathematics shows their growth is unsustainable (if the scheme starts with six people, by the 13th level, it would contain 13 BILLION if the growth were consistent, more than the Earth's population). Multi-Level Marketing companies skirts around these laws by offering products, and making each of the people "sellers", or "business owners".
• The State of Emergency (which might or might not declare martial law) is a universal loophole under which a country can suspend certain rights if it is deemed necessary to ensure the very survival of the country. Most of the time it is meant to last for some months to a year, but if extended (thus becoming a double loophole) it can come to uphold a plain dictatorship.
• If someone wants to report a news story that can't legally be released in their own country, they can just sell the story to a news source in another country and it will be published online where everyone in their country can see it anyway.
• Trial by jury was designed to grant the accused the right to be judged by their peers and require the government to prove to their peers that they are guilty. However, juries can also use their power to acquit people of breaking laws the jury doesn't agree with, regardless of the evidence.
  • This is known as jury nullification, and while it is allowed, the defense is usually forbidden from even telling jurors they have the option to do so. That rule is there so this only happens, in theory, when the jurors agree that a conviction would truly not be just. Jurors are usually instructed to look at the facts of the case, and if the burden of proof is met (usually "beyond a reasonable doubt"), that they MUST find the defendant guilty. This is an attempt at limiting the use of this loophole only to cases where using it serves the interests of justice.
• Despite there being no actual law against the sale of military rations in most countries (even though they say "Not for resale"), how resellers of rations get around this is they wait a while for the rations to go out of circulation or they're extra leftovers and sell them off as military surplus goods, which is legal.
• Proprietary software licenses are explicitly designed to get around the doctrine of first sale. According to this doctrine, you can do anything you want with the copy you've paid for, except for making copies and distributing them (right reserved to copyright owners, but beyond this point of first sale, copyright owners cannot control copies legally made, which is why selling used books is legal). Software licenses make it clear that you're buying a "license" to use the software, not a copy. The software belongs to the company, and the license (a private contract) places additional restrictions that the copyright law doesn't.
• Have you ever wondered why you see ads on the internet or TV which present multiple-choice questions a ten-year-old could answer and promise you great prizes if you get it right? Well, you don't win the prize right away but this is a step to be entered for a chance to win the prize via drawing lots. In many countries, the laws and regulations concerning lottery draws and similar events where winning is purely up to chance are considerably stricter than those regarding quizzes and similar competitions. You just need to add one quiz-style question as a step for people entering the draw and it qualifies as the latter. It doesn't matter whether the question is so easy that to not know the answer you would have to have to be a Martian.
• The so-called "Sharing Economy" is the embodiment of Loophole Abuse. Uber and Lyft are effectively cab companies that outsource all of their labor to "contractors" which sidesteps the regulations that normal taxi companies have to follow. Airbnb is effectively a hotel service, but it does not have to follow many of the regulations that real hotels have to follow, such as anti-discrimination laws or fire codes.
• Cruise ships, and ocean liners back in the day, pull this all the time. Ships follow the maritime laws of the country they are flagged to while in international waters, not the country they depart from (like airplanes). Thus, it's entirely legal to have ships with casinos to pick up passengers in a non-gambling country and then move to either waters where it is legal or to international waters. Similarly, some ships opt to flag in countries with low drinking ages to entice minors to book their cruises (or have their parents book with them) just to drink legally.
• The legal case between Odyssey Marine Exploration and the Spanish government for the ownership of the sunken Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was plagued by successful and unsuccessful instances of Loophole Abuse:
  • The root of the issue is that unlike in America, all archaeological finds in Spain belong to the Spanish government, regardless of who finds them or who owns the land they are in. Since Odyssey was aware of this, it searched in international waters just outside Spanish national waters, which are known to be littered with shipwrecks, when it came across the wreck of Las Mercedes, sunk at the Battle of Cape Santa María in 1804, and proceeded to take its contents to Gibraltar before flying them to the United States.
  • However, while sunken ships are generally considered abandoned and their cargo belongs to whoever takes it... this excludes military vessels, which are considered cemeteries and remain, along with everything in them, the property of the country they were sailing under. This exception was pushed by the United States in the aftermath of World War II and was drafted with the ships sunk during that war in mind. However, since no time limit was ever introduced, Spain could lay claim to the ownership of Las Mercedes, even though it was built in Cuba in 1786 and was in international waters, because it belonged to the Spanish Navy when it sank. And it did.
  • Odyssey tried to argue that the wreck was actually a British ship - first HMS Sussex (sunk 1693) and then the Merchant Royal (sunk 1641). These claims were proven false because both ships were known to have sunk too far away, the remains showed evidence of a gunpowder explosion before sinking (which was the case of Las Mercedes, but not the others), and the coins Odyssey was extracting and preparing for auction were Spanish pieces-of-eight bearing the image of Charles IV, who reigned over a century after either British shipwreck, in 1788-1808.
  • In a desperate move, Odyssey tried to get the government of Peru to make a competing claim on the wreck, arguing that, while the ship may belong to Spain, the metals had been mined in colonial Peru and the coins struck in Lima; as a result, the real owner was the Republic of Peru because it was the modern successor of the colonial Viceroyalty of Peru. This didn't fly, and two American tribunals in Florida and Georgia ruled both that Spain was the legal owner of the findings, and that Odyssey had knowingly acted against the law and in bad faith.
  • In turn, the verdict opened Spain to claim any sunken Spanish ship around the globe, even ships that were built, loaded and sunk entirely in what are now the national waters of other countries. This exact problem arose when the Spanish galleon San José (sunk 1708) was found right after just off the port of Cartagena, Colombia. After negotiations between the Colombian and Spanish governments, however, Spain agreed to assist in the salvage of the galleon and letting it stay in Colombia - with the condition that its content was to be studied in a museum and not auctioned.
• Pick-up trucks and three-wheeled cars were made originally so that car makers didn't have to follow regulations made for standard four-wheeled cars, and some of them only became popular (such as the Reliant Robin, which is best known for having three wheels and tipping over at the slightest turn) because a person driving them didn't need to pay car taxes and only needed a cheaper motorcycle license to drive one.
• Walmart can't do its usual tricks in Europe since 35-38 hours would be full-time in much of the continent: in Britain 37.5 hours a week is generally seen as the default and 35 hours in France. However the main distinction in terms of rights is between permanent and temporary workers - Ain't No Rule against relieving temps for no reason (especially just before three months are up and EU law specifies they get the same rights as permanent workers), or making as many jobs as possible temporary, to skirt around workers rights.
  • "Constructive Dismissal" wouldn't work in the UK as it is a legitimate reason to take your employer to an industrial tribunal so trying this would be risky for the employer.
• When a European court challenged Microsoft to offer an alternative version of Windows which did not include Internet Explorer, Microsoft gave them such a version... which crashed immediately on boot, claiming a missing DLL file. When the court objected that Microsoft should not be allowed to provide a version of Windows that did not work, Microsoft contended that it did work - since this was the intended behaviour of the program if that file was missing.
• Old Norse Law had a built-in loophole. Each year the laws were read out (about 1/3rd a year) and if a law was left out and no one made a point of it that law was removed.
• As mentioned in Pachinko (see the section on Japan), this is actually one of the reasons tokens, tickets, and poker chips were invented - so you can technically say that you aren't "exchanging money" for games of chance.
• Trading cards like Magic: The Gathering sidestep gambling laws:
  • One intent was for you to wager cards. You're not wagering "money" so to speak.... you're wagering "Cards". Most people don't actually do this.
  • As a card game, one that can sometimes rely on random chance in terms of shuffling and drawing the cards you need, why are people allowed to win money at tournaments? Technically, it's a game of skill - because the game does not rely entirely on RNG, it's technically not a game of chance - it's a game of skill. Thus you can win money from tournaments and not be considered gambling
    • However, some countries have cracked down on this to varying levels - some don't allow you to win money at tournaments if you're under "legal age", for example.
  • During the lootbox debate, some say that "Blind buy" packs are not in fact gambling because you can't "Cash out" your cards. As anyone who works at a game shop or has visited sites can tell you, this is not the case - cards can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the second-hand market. So how have Hasbro and Konami not been cracked down upon by gambling? Simple - much like Pachinko Parlours in Japan, manufacturers of card games do not offer an official channel for you to buy or sell the cards. You have sites like eBay or Amazon, game stores, or even conducting transactions with the neighborhood kid. Neither of which are owned by the manufacturer, and since any money from these transactions does not go to the manufacturer, their hands are entirely clean. You can thus "cash out" cards you got from boosters that are obtained through random chance.
• Speaking of lootboxes, a common defence of lootboxes and cosmetic items in video games is that "You can't cash out your winnings". Except some games - especially those available on Steam - allow you to "Trade" items to other players or "sell" them on the Steam marketplace for Steam currency, which isn't valid for anything except Steam. So it's not "Gambling". Ain't No Rule saying you can't just make a very lopsided trade while the money changes hands via second-hand sites. This is proven to be very very profitable.
  • Real world trade is also against the rules of most games that allow such trading. Ain't No Rule saying it has to be your main account! In fact, this is common practice - anyone who engages in real world trade or botting usually makes dozens of fake accounts specifically to eat up ban waves.
• Written agreements of any kind, lease agreements especially, can be subject to these if they're worded vague enough or if they have "exceptions" clauses. How this works varies from country to country but it's not unheard of for people to either get or give the shortest end of the stick because of how it's worded.
• By law, the American intelligence services cannot spy on American citizens while on American soil, and British intelligence services cannot spy on British citizens while on British soil. However, ain't no rule those countries cannot spy on each other's citizens and then exchange the data due to them being part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
• Head shops, or shops that sell products typically for the use of marijuana, if they are located in prohibition areas, will avoid breaking paraphernalia laws by openly saying that their products are for tobacco use only, and will kick out anyone that makes it explicitly known that they are buying products for marijuana.
• Many environmental laws and pledges state that something must be accomplished "using renewable energy sources". A common loophole abuse is to meet such a pledge by burning wood, which is considered a "renewable energy source" because trees can be replanted. But replanted trees take a long time to grow, so actually using wood renewably requires very careful management and limiting of energy usage over time; and simply pledging to use wood as an energy source makes no promises about doing either of those things. So the wording allows an energy strategy which would lead to an entire forest being burned before the replanted trees were more than saplings to still be considered "renewable".
• Token purchases where one party officially sells something to another party for some ridiculously low price is a way of getting around laws that forbid or discourage gifting for whatever reason. Note that this is not to be confused with a straw purchase where someone who is legally barred from buying something (e.g., alcohol for someone underage) tries to get someone else to buy it for them, which is still illegal and would put both people in trouble.
  • Several countries have gift taxes that are levied when one party gives a big gift to another, usually meant as a way to discourage rich people from trying to avoid inheritance tax for their children. In some places this can be very hefty — the US, for example, has a 40% tax rate for gifts worth over $15,000. If a father wants to give his teenage son a car and not want to pay $6,000 to the Intimidating Revenue Service, he can officially sell his son the car for $1 to legally make it a sale rather than a gift and avoid both the paperwork and the tax.
  • In 2003, Germany entered an agreement with Poland to donate their ex-East German MiG-29's to them. The sole issue with this is that international law forbids donating weapons for free to another nation. It doesn't, however, say that you can't sell those fighter jets for one Euro apiece.
• A "royal lives clause" allows you to tie the length of a contract to the lifespan of the British Monarch and all of their descendants. This can be used as a tactic used to get around the usual rules against contracts being enforceable in-perpetuity, since it can significantly extend the typical length of a contract well beyond when it would usually be allowed to be applied to. This isn't just relevant to the United Kingdom either; Walt Disney World is infamous for having included this clause to significantly weaken the influence of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, a body created in 2023 to replace the much more Disney-influenced Reedy Creek Improvement District.
  if the perpetual term of this Declaration is deemed to violate the "Rule against Perpetuities," or any similar law or rule, this Declaration shall continue in effect until twenty one (21) years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England living as of the date of this Declaration.

America

Brazil

• Joke election candidates are fairly common in Brazil. In the past, a rhino was massively voted for São Paulo's city council, and a chimpanzee's 'candidacy' for mayor of Rio de Janeiro had him end in third among 12 candidates. This specific practice of writing a joke vote in your bill died when electronic voting machines came around, but it doesn't stop ludicrously Campy or just downright hilarious candidates (who may or may not do that for the joke) from appearing in political campaigns. They rarely succeed, but when they do, the supposed "protest-voting" behind it backfires when splash-votes help other, serious, not as well-intentioned politicians get in charge.
• The only entity allowed to give cash prizes in Brazil is the lottery. Thus network SBT circumvented that in their game shows by awarding gold - or rather, gold certificates, that were then exchanged in the bank for the equivalent money.

Canada

• In Canada, there are strict regulations and spending limits for political parties in election campaigns. However, there's nothing to prevent a party in power from using official government advertising to promote their agenda, nor do such spending limits exist outside of the official campaign period. Prior to the 2015 election, the then-ruling Conservative Party exploited both loopholes, using government money to run ads promoting policies not yet in place, as well as spending their own money to run attack ads.
• Solicitation for prostitution is illegal in Canada, but prostitution itself isn't, leading to officially recognized loophole abuse: if a prostitute and customer can arrange a sex-for-money deal without either one actually explicitly proposing a sex-for-money deal, no crime has been committed.
• Canada prohibits annoying the administration by paying a large fine with pennies: By law, pennies are considered legal tender for amounts no greater than 25 cents.
• The Bayside Canadian Railway is the shortest commercial railway in the world, at just 70 meters (220 feet) long. Its sole purpose is to exploit a loophole in the United States's Jones Act, which requires the use of USA-flagged ships with mostly-US crews for shipments between two US ports. The law makes an exception however for shipments that travel over part of a Canadian railroad. So when American Seafoods wants to ship fish from Alaska to the Eastern US using foreign-flagged vessels and crews (which are cheaper to operate because don't have to follow as many environmental and safety regulations) they are in violation of the Jones Act, unless they transport some of their fish via rail for part of the journey. Previously, the fish was sent on a thirty-mile trip on the New Brunswick Southern, but in 2012 the company created the Bayside Canadian Railway to keep the rail transport requirement: Trucks drive onto a pair of flatcars, a small shunter goes on a 45 second round trip up and down the line, and the truck continues on its way, Jones Act circumvented! In 2021, US Customs and Border Protection did file a complaint that this practice would violate the Jones Act due to the rail line not being a "through route", with the case ongoing. This video gives further details.
• The original Canadian constitution of 1867 (most of which remains in force today) mandates a national census every 10 years, in years ending in 1. However, the law has been interpreted to allow more frequent censuses. Starting in 1906, the federal government began conducting censuses every 5 years in the prairie provinces (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan) to monitor growth in that region. The 5-year interval was extended to the entire country in 1956.

Guatemala

• The Guatemalan constitution has very specific restrictions on who can run for president. One of those restrictions forbids anyone related to the president or vice-president, either by blood up to fourth-degree or by marriage up to second-degree. So in 2011, then-First Lady Sandra Torres divorced the president and presented herself to the race. She was still denied, and today is a moot point (at least regarding her) since the restriction only applies to the current president.

Mexico

• Under the 1857 Mexican Constitution, the vice-president, attorney general, foreign secretary, and interior secretary stood in line to the presidency. During a coup in 1913, General Victoriano Huerta had the president, vice-president and attorney-general arrested and forced to resign; the foreign secretary, now president, was forced to appoint Huerta interior secretary, then resign without filling the other positions, which made Huerta "legally" the president. All of this happened within the same day, 19 February 1913. As a result, the presidency of the foreign secretary (Pedro Lascuráin) is the shortest in world history.

United States

• This is how the American legal system works. The law code does not cover what is legal; it only defines what is illegal. If the law says nothing about something, then you can technically do it legally.
  • There are various rules of statutory interpretation which mitigate this, such as the "mischief rule", which is best understood as "what is the mischief the legislature was trying to prevent with this law?" and then upholding that prevention, and the "golden rule", which is "don't be a twit". Indeed, judges hate Loophole Abuse, and unless the law is so badly drafted that they can't change it without legislating from the courtroom, a lawyer will spend their time convincing them that their argument is not loophole abuse. Famous common law cases where this was tried include a Canadian case where a man tried to claim that a law forcing drugstores to close at 10:00pm let him re-open at 10:01, and an English case where a statutory ban on solicitation or molestation by "common prostitutes"^note As distinct from street prostitutes and normal prostitutes (i.e, the ones the judges use.) in the street was circumvented by solicitation from balconies and windows. The legal judgements in both cases are essentially the sentence "piss off and stop wasting my time" expressed in 2,000 words.
  • The Elastic Clause says that the United States Constitution covers things which aren't explicitly spelled out in it. In other words, it's a loophole designed to cover loopholes.
• While many of The Mafia bosses such as Paul Castellano, Joe Bonanno and Vincent Gigante imposed a so-called "ban" on drug running, it actually wasn't because of a moral opposition, but the fear of stiff penalties and one of their henchmen squealing should they ever get caught. The bosses got around this by letting their men loan out money to drug pushers while getting a cut of the sales and as long as they did it without raising attention.
• Between 2008 and 2011, in the midst of another (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to get the American public to adopt the use of $1 coins, the United States Mint started offering to sell up to 500 of the new Presidential Series dollar coins, as well as an unlimited amount of the existing Sacajawea coins, at face value, with free shipping. To facilitate getting the coins into circulation, the Mint allowed the use of credit cards to purchase the coins. Unfortunately for the Mint, they soon found that the coins were going straight from their vaults, to purchasers' bank's vaults, as people soon figured out that they could simply buy as many coins as their cards would allow, immediately use the coins to pay the debt (thus avoiding finance charges) and use the purchases to rack up free perks like frequent flyer miles, cash back on purchases (literally making money off every purchase) and other membership points deals. Eventually the Mint caught on to the scheme and limited the amount of coins you could buy and how often you could buy them. They also had the coin purchases processed as cash advances, which didn't count towards any rewards. Today I Found Out has the story in more detail here.
• The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, operator of the New York City Subway, has a couple of these:
  • The MTA put forward a rule that no animals (except service animals) may board trains or enter stations without being inside a container. The implication is that small pets should be carried in purses and larger ones should be inside travel crates, but the rule doesn't specifically say anything about what kinds of "containers" are valid: Cue pet owners carrying their dog in a duffel bag, or cutting four holes in a plastic IKEA bag so their pet can wear it.
  • One option for locals/commuters is to purchase a monthly MTA Card, which allows for unlimited rides at unlimited intervals - with a cooldown of 18 minutes to avoid, say, just handing the card back to a friend behind the gates so they could get in on the same account. However, nothing prevents someone from swiping someone else in as you yourself leave the station at your final destination, meaning it's fully possible to travel completely for free in New York with enough generous people and patience.
• Prior to 2016, Mixed Martial Arts was long unsanctioned in New York, meaning the UFC couldn't hold events there. However, there's nothing in that law that says underground fight clubs are illegal.
• The main reason behind Attack of the Political Ad being a Real Life trope in the United States is due to laws and rules regulating advertising by Political Action Committees or similar groups. Such groups cannot coordinate with or directly support a candidate, but there is nothing prohibiting them from bashing the opponents of their preferred candidate, and since the vast majority of elections in the US are between a Republican and a Democrat, there is little doubt as to which candidate a particular group supports, rendering the above restriction almost meaningless. Alas, thanks to the Citizens United decision, this is likely only to get worse as subsequent elections draw in more and more money from PACs.
  • Similarly, there's no rule saying a candidates' friends, family or long term aides can't work for PACs, or that people who are obviously planning to run for office but haven't officially announced their candidacy can't work with PACs that support them later.
  • Also, just because candidates can't provide footage specifically for advertisements produced by PACs, nothing is stopping them from putting "public domain" footage of themselves on their campaign website for anyone to download and use. Notoriously, in 2016, presidential candidate Ted Cruz uploaded a long, awkward conversation with his mother, and Senator Mitch McConnell uploaded a short clip of himself looking up from his desk and smiling at the camera; the latter provoked a contest by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (called "McConnelling") to see who could pair up the footage with the most ridiculous accompanying music.
  • This was in no small part the reasoning behind the Citizens United decision. The case involved a political group creating a movie studio and trying to release an unfavorable documentary on Hillary Clinton. The court ruled that advertising laws didn't apply to "the press", and a company is "the press" if they provide any speech which could be blocked by campaign advertising laws, so campaign advertising restrictions were unconstitutional.
• This trope, along with Rules Lawyering and Exact Words, is the reason why so many government regulations and laws are so long, complicated, and excessively wordy. When making laws and regulations, the people who do so are very aware that if a loophole can be found, someone will exploit it. So they try to cover everything they can imagine when writing laws. There's a reason why "other income" is listed as a category on your income tax form. They mean all other income. If you're a drug dealer making millions illegally, you still have to report it on your income taxes. Income tax evasion is common because the people who do it are generally caught between a rock and a hard place. Report the illegal income so that you don't get in trouble with the IRS? Good work! You're a upstanding citizen. Ain't no rule that says the IRS can't report your illegal income to the Police, FBI, DEA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, etc. If you buy eggs, it may seem like they use the term "chicken eggs" way too much. But if you buy eggs and it's not specified that they have to be chicken eggs, then there ain't no rule against your supplier bringing you ant eggs, salmon eggs... you get the picture.
• Salaried workers in the US receive no overtime if they receive over $455 per week.
• In July 2008, the state of Nebraska passed a "Safe Haven" law, saying that parents may leave a child at certain hospitals, no questions asked, if for any reason they feel they are not fit to care for the child. This was designed to prevent the cruel abandonment and death of unwanted infants. However, unlike many similar laws, this program did not specify an age limit nor restrict its use to state residents. It made the news after thirty-six teenagers were dropped off, mostly by out-of-staters who traveled to Nebraska for that purpose. (The Obvious Rule Patch was quickly passed to specify the acceptance of only infants up to 30 days old.)
• U.S. Law Enforcement is required to read suspects their rights before interrogating (technically interviewing) suspects, not necessarily immediately after arresting them. Those rights exist regardless of whether the officer reads them aloud. As soon as the suspect realizes he or she is being interrogated, or that he/she isn't free to walk away from the conversation at any time, or even so long as the other person in the conversation is a police officer regardless of whether they're in police custody or not, the suspect has the right to remain silent.
  • Specter of abuse was raised in United States after 9/11, as many suspected terrorists were placed in "protective custody" as "material witnesses" without legal protection.
• While most cities have a general "no indecent exposure" law which makes it illegal to be naked in public, there ain't no rule against riding the subway in your underwear. Nudity as a form of protest, such as during the annual World Naked Bike Ride, is also protected by the First Amendment in the U.S.
  • Additionally, "indecent exposure" laws will generally say that it's illegal to show your "private parts" in public. But in some jurisdictions, "private parts" do not include a woman's breasts. So in some places there actually isn't a rule that a woman can't go topless in public.
• Ain't no rule against a cat being a town mayor, though in this case it's just an honorary position.
• Ain't no rule that says a fictional pundit can't run for President. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party of South Carolina decided there was a rule that said all candidates had to be "serious". Stephen Colbert continued his satirical run for "President of the United States of South Carolina" anyway, and encouraged his fans to vote for Herman Cain (who'd withdrawn from the race but was already on the ballot) in the Republican Primary as a proxy for him. It should be noted however this only (sorta) worked because Colbert and his character share the same name and thus he could say that the real person was just happening to run in character. There also ain't no rule saying a comedian can't have his own super-PAC. Colbert actually got the Federal Election Commission to rule in his favor on this subject.
• When the city of Chicago constructed the Chicago Skyway in 1958, they wished to operate it as a toll road to recover the cost of building it. The city charter did not give authority to operate a toll road; however, it did allow the city to have a toll bridge, even one with a six-mile approach. This is the reason why I-90 from when it leaves the Dan Ryan to the toll plaza at the northwest side of the bridge is entrance-only heading towards the toll plaza and exit-only when heading north towards downtown.
• Several members of a well-known biker gang in California once subverted state law requiring a motorcycle operator to "wear a helmet" by strapping one to their knee. Ain't no rule saying a helmet should be worn on the head.
• The blocking of a loophole inadvertently led to the gay marriage movement. Prior to the 1970s, there was no law in any US state - or anywhere in the world, in fact - that said that a marriage had to be between a man and a woman. However, the idea of gay marriage had not even occurred to the gay rights movement - it was as much an anti-gay symbol to them as it was to social conservatives. In 1970, two gay student activists in Minnesota, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license, and were denied by the clerk on the basis that they were of the same sex. Baker and McConnell took the issue to court, not on the grounds that it was discrimination, but that both the right to marry and freedom of association were enshrined in law, and nothing said that two men couldn't get married. They failed to win the case, but as the court simply dismissed their case rather than ruling against them, no binding precedent was set. Social conservatives now realized that all it would take for a gay couple to get married now was a sympathetic clerk who would grant them a marriage license, and rushed to make explicit laws banning gay marriage; social conservatives in other countries also took note and did the same. But this caught the attention of the gay rights movement, who had largely been uninterested in gay marriage before, but were angered by the introduction of more explicitly anti-gay laws; serious debate on the subject began within the community, eventually leading to a consensus that equal access to marriage for gay and straight couples should be made a goal of the movement. Starting in the 1990s, various places began enacting laws reversing the 1970s changes and explicitly permitting persons of the same sex to marry; in the United States, where this whole business started, various states adopted laws permitting same-sex marriages starting in 2004 (when Massachusetts ended the limitation of marriage to straight couples by a judicial decision, with Iowa of all places following suit in 2006), and in 2015 the federal Supreme Court held that the right to marry was fundamental and forbade states from prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying.
• During the Salem Witch Trials of the early 1690s, farmer Giles Corey had the misfortune of being accused of witchcraft. One particular problem he faced was that those convicted of witchcraft would have their land and property legally declared forfeit, and he found himself faced with two unenviable choices: plead guilty, be convicted of witchcraft, and lose his farm; or plead not guilty, be found guilty anyway, be convicted of witchcraft, and lose his farm. Instead, he Took a Third Option: he didn't enter any plea. Under the laws of the time, a defendant couldn't be tried if they did not enter a plea. The court, determined to get a plea and continue with legal proceedings, subjected Corey to Cold-Blooded Torture by "pressing": laying a wooden plank on top of him and piling stones on top in the hope that the pain of being crushed would force him to give a plea. Instead, Corey would prove to be Defiant to the End and only say "More weight!" He ultimately died as a result of his torture, but in so doing escaped being tried and convicted, ensuring his family would keep his farm.
• Most posts in US elections have only the barest minimum of requirements. Residency is usually the only one, with age being second most common. Technically, anyone who fills these requirements is "qualified" to run for the office.
  • There are virtually no hard qualifications for ANY elected or appointed position in the United States Government. The US constitution spells out some very bare minimum requirements (age, residency, time since acquisition of citizenship^note Seven years for the House, nine years for the Senate, life for the President—i.e. you have to be born a citizen, whether that's because you were born in the country or at least one of your parents was American is never actually made clear in the constitution.) for both Members of Congress and the President, but that's it. Attempts to add additional requirements via legislation have been declared unconstitutional. To get the two-term limit for the President, a Constitutional Amendment had to be passed. For the various appointed offices, about the only requirements which have been legislatively added are age and competency (i.e. you must be a legal adult (18) not under the legal control of another or the court). That's it — they don't even check if you're a citizen or not.
  • For the U.S. Presidency, this is supposed to be mitigated by the Electoral College, which ultimately decides the presidency. The Framers felt that direct democracy was too subject to abuse by demagogues or just people being tricked. In theory, the Electoral College is supposed to be more responsible and educated elites. In practice, many states have laws requiring electors to vote the way the state voted, and the electors have never decided an election differently than the voters, though it did come close in the election of 1800.
  • Speaking of the line of succession, there is another weird loophole in that the Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate do not actually have to be a member of those bodies. Those bodies can pick anyone they want to lead them, even non-citizens. So, considering that members of the cabinet also don't have to be citizens, it is technically possible to have the entire line of succession of the US (except the vice president, who does have to meet the criteria) filled with non-citizens who can't become president. In a somewhat more realistic sense, since both the House and the Senate have lower age minimums and less stringent citizenship requirements (Representatives and Senators can be naturalized citizens, while the President must be a citizen by birth), it is theoretically possible for the Speaker of the House and/or the President pro tempore of the Senate to be selected from their respective bodies but still not be eligible to succeed the President, either because they're too young or because they acquired citizenship through naturalization rather than at birth. In reality, it's extremely unlikely that the majority party that selects that individual would ever take this route, as they want their representative to be able to succeed the President if it came to that, but there's no actual law prohibiting them from doing so.
  • Averted in the case of non-Federal Government posts, most of which have a laundry list of required qualifications, due to loophole abuse.
  • Also averted in the case of normal Civil Service Federal jobs, which are likewise subject to considerable regulation on requirements.
  • Though this comes from one of the basic ideas that anyone can and should be able to run for office rather than limiting office to nobility or what have you. However, many such positions, such as attorney general and judge, do have additional requirements, such as "must have actively practiced law for at least X years prior".
  • This means that election to the post is based on the discretion on the voters, rather than on some immense tome that tries to predict every single possibility that may occur, even centuries in the future, and then make a judgement on whether hypothetical situations are desirable or not. Essentially the lack of rules is a vote of confidence that the voters can make sensible choices, based on whatever criteria are relevant at the time.
• As often the case with a more sophisticated systems, the situation above itself arises from an attempt to block possible Loophole Abuse: professional and other qualification requirement were and are used as a discrimination tool in many points of history and the present world. It also serves to make Regulatory Capture contagious, if one less-then-straight institution finds itself with the exclusive right to vet candidates for another.
  • There are, in fact, no qualifications whatsoever to be a Justice on the US Supreme Court (beyond the fact that you must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate). Children, noncitizens, felons, or even nominating yourself is fair game (though you can't be President and a Justice at the same time; you'd have to resign from the Presidency).
    • Nor is the number of Supreme Court justices specified by the US Constitution, which led FDR to propose the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. This bill would have allowed the President to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice for every Justice over 70 years old (which, at the time, would have meant fifteen Justices on the Supreme Court). Ostensibly this was to ensure adequate succession planning, but it was seen at the time as a means of doing an end-run around a Supreme Court hostile to FDR's New Deal. Roosevelt got his way in the end anyway simply by serving long enough to replace 8 of the 9 Justices—one of whom retired in the midst of the scandal.
  • Strictly speaking, the only requirements for serving on the Cabinet are to be nominated by the President and be able to convince at least 50% of the people in the Senate present and voting that you'd be a good choice for the job.
• As was typically done for death row inmates, Lawrence Brewer was offered a last meal before his execution. He went all out with his order, since the state of Texas didn't have any limitations on what the last meal could consist of, and ordered a large burger, two steaks, a pizza, fajitas, and more. There were no rules saying that he actually had to eat his last meal, however, and as a final "screw you" to the state, he refused to eat his last meal. Legislators responded by closing this loophole permanently, which they did by ending the practice of last meals in Texas.
• US federal tax law requires that whenever a gambler wins $1,200 or more on a single bet on any casino gambling machine, the win must be paid by hand and both the casino and the winner must fill out tax forms regarding the money won. Slot machines are often designed to make things easier by modifying the pay tables to replace all instances of $1,200 with $1,199. (For example, if a certain combination pays $400 for a $1 bet, the same combination on a $3 bet would pay $1,199 instead of $1,200.)
  • Similarly, US Federal Laws require reporting bank transfers of $10,000 or more between accounts, and also stipulate that leaving or entering the country with $10,000 or more in "negotiable form" (a specific Rules Patch mean to cover cash, financial instruments, and foreign currency including gold coins) requires the traveller to explicitly declare that amount. Consequently, many criminals arrange for bank transfers slightly below this limit, and "cash mules" working for various criminal organizations frequently travel with $9,990. The criminals simply make larger numbers of transactions (or use more mules) to get the total amount transferred without the required notices being filed (and alerting law enforcement).
    • This, in turn, led to a "structuring" law, whereas doing this can lead to immediate civil seizure of all funds in an account. (This law was most famously used in 2015 to bring down former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Dennis Hastert when Hastert was caught withdrawing money in this way in order to pay hush money to someone whom he apparently had abused while still a high school teacher and wrestling coach back in the 1970s.)
• The ATF used to define a machine gun as a gun that fires more than one bullet per pull of the trigger. The Sputter Gun has no trigger. The ATF caught on and changed the wording. Also, they sometimes tried to "catch" what obviously is a faulty semi-auto (some mechanisms can shoot twice or more when worn — not that they're safe enough to be useful at this stage) under this.
  • Manually cranked Gatling guns do count as semi-automatic however because each fractional movement of the crank mechanism counts as a "trigger pull". Criminals everywhere took note when Colt offered brand new reproductions of its Model 1877 Bulldog Gatling for the low low price of $50,000 and weighing in at over 300 pounds fully set up.
  • Volley guns, or guns with multiple barrels that fire simultaneously, are not considered machine guns per the ATF definition. A machine gun has to fire multiple bullets sequentially per trigger pull, but volley guns fire them at once. This led to some interesting takes, including:
    • The Arsenel Arms AF2011A1, which is, to put it very simply, two M1911 pistols glued together.
    • The S333 Thunderstruck revolver, which is a double barreled, double chambered revolver.
    • In addition, any gun that has multiple barrels with a trigger for each, like a double-barreled shotgun or double rifle, is not considered a machine gun if the user can pull more than one trigger at once.
  • The bump stock, made known from the infamous Las Vegas shooting in October 2017, had been this as well. When a weapon is fired, the stock recoils against the wielder's shoulder. With a bump stock, the receiver recoils into a spring within the stock, the trigger falling into a recess in the grip so it is no longer being pulled, then bounces forward into the user's finger, pulling the trigger again. With this a weapon can fire repeatedly at a rate close to what it could do in full-auto, while still technically being semi-automatic since the trigger has been pulled and then reset between each shot. An initial blanket attempt to legally close this "loophole" following the massacre fell prey to the concept being so mechanically simple that the law proposed would have outlawed belt loops; individual states had more success in banning the devices specifically, two states having already made them illegal before the shooting (California way back in 1990, New York in 2013) and eight other states moving to do the same after (New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland and Washington) until the ATF was able to ban them outright in 2019.
  • The massive amount of abusable loopholes in the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban are the primary reason so many people on both sides of the gun control debate hated it so much. Ban sales of a gun by name, without specifying that anything about how it actually works needs to be changed (AK-47 or TEC-9)? The selling company will literally just rename the gun. Ban importation of a pistol due to its small size (Walther PPK)? They'll just send the parts over to be assembled and sold domestically, or slap its slide onto the frame of its bigger cousin to increase the weight just enough to pass the minimum limit. And so on.
  • For a long time, rifles, shotguns and pistols have been lightly regulated in their separate categories. But putting a barrel shorter than sixteen-and-a-half inches on a rifle, a barrel shorter than than eighteen-and-a-half inches on a shotgun, or a shoulder stock on a pistol created a new class of firearm that is highly regulated and requires an expensive, special, and difficult to obtain (many, MANY legal hoops to jump through plus a months-long wait) tax stamp. Recently, a firearms industry insider applied the Exact Words of US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms regulations and created this bastard shotgun. The Feds are still trying to figure out how to ban it. Or at least require the aforementioned tax stamp. Since the ATF defines a shotgun as a "shoulder-fired" smoothbore weapon, both Mossberg and Remington have seized on this and began marketing their own factory Sawed-Off Shotguns that include a special "bird's head" pistol grip that brings them up the minimum 26-inch total length, allowing the guns to avoid both the legal criteria that would get them classified as short-barreled shotguns.
  • This goes ditto for "pistol braces" on rifles configured as pistols. They're meant to keep the weapon steady while Firing One-Handed, but it took all of two seconds for owners to figure out that it could be used as a functional (if somewhat uncomfortable) shoulder stock. The ATF previously allowed them to remain legal on the condition that they not be used in this manner, but eventually changed their official position on both this and the above-mentioned shotguns to "Whatevs." Enthusiasts still recommend keeping a copy of the ATF's letter handy in case you run into an overzealous police officer or range director, however, and individual states may have their own laws that supersede the Federal ruling.
  • Federal law has rules for rifles (rifled bores) and shotguns (smooth bores). Then Franklin Armory announced the Reformation, a rifle-looking weapon with a sub-16" barrel (normally a regulated Short Barreled Rifle) that wasn't a rifle. Cue the internet going nuts as everyone tried to guess how it worked. The secret? The barrel has grooves like a rifle, but they aren't twisted so the barrel isn't rifled and isn't smooth. As an actual weapon the Reformation is mostly useless due to the lack of rifling, but as a rules-lawyering ploy it was pure genius. The Reformation was eventually classified by the ATF as a short-barreled shotgun....under the 1968 Gun Control Act rather than the 1934 National Firearms Act that defines short-barreled rifles and shotguns. So yes, Franklin "lost"....by forcing the ATF to invent a new classification under which to regulate it.
  • Belt-fed guns converted to semi-auto are growing in popularity in places that have magazine restrictions. This is because belt-fed weapons simply do not have a magazine at all (even the types you do see on some military ones are just boxes that hold the belts, with no mechanism for actually feeding it into a gun like the spring in a normal magazine), and thus you can fire as much ammo as you want without reloading. The MG 42 is the symbol of more than one Canadian gun club for this very reason.
  • After the Cold War ended, US President Clinton and Russian President Yeltsin signed various agreements against importation of Russian firearms into America, making more modern Russian designs far more difficult to acquire outside of their home. However, military-issue firearms that had been taken out of circulation bypassed many of these restrictions because they qualified for "curio & relic" status. And, in a double-instance of this trope, just about everything the Soviet-era military used qualified for one reason or another. Normally a gun has to have been manufactured at least fifty years ago to qualify for this status, which several weapons like the various types of Mosin-Nagant (a design originating from a hundred years prior to the Cold War ending and having been all but entirely replaced in every role it served in by the '50s) qualified for. Those that didn't, like more recently-produced Makarov pistols? They still qualified for the fact that the entities who produced and used them, like the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, no longer technically existed; this has allowed the Makarov to go from a gun you used to only see in the hands of movie bad guys to one of the most popular civilian handguns in the United States because importing and purchasing one is about as easy as importing and purchasing a SIG Sauer or Heckler & Koch handgun - and noticeably cheaper.
  • Products of trying to skirt the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) are the Olympic Arms OA-96 and OA-98 "AR-15 pistols." Basically, it's an AR-15 with a different gas system, no stock, and a shortened barrel. For the OA-96, Olympic Arms took advantage of the fact that if the gun doesn't have a removable magazine, it's not an assault weapon. So the magazine is epoxied in place and you reload the gun by field-stripping it, similar to a break-action gun, and feed rounds into the magazine. Obviously nobody liked this so Olympic Arms made the updated OA-98. It has a removable magazine, but it's been skeletonized to hell so the weight is just under the legal limit of a pistol and the handguard was changed with a cage that exposes just enough barrel to also not be considered an assault weapon.
• The advance of technology allows crazy abuses when the law fails to predict that certain acts could ever be possible. Example: it is currently legal to program a computer to buy and sell stock for you. Therefore, it is legal to program it to buy stock in New York and immediately sell in Chicago during the split-second intervals when the two exchanges are out of sync on that stock's value^note Note that this is physically impossible: the time for information to be synced between two computers in such disparate locations is much greater than your ability to play on that split-second. Computer trading, however, does allow for as many as 500,000 transactions a millisecond, and current telecommunications technology and speed upgrades are very strongly driven by financial corporations who are desperately trying to outpace their competitors by thousandths of a millisecond. It's even been proposed that financial institutions should invest in developing the technology to emit and detect signals using neutrinos, because even though we can already send signals around the earth at something close to light speed, we could still shave a little time off by the direct route: through the Earth.
• In US states where the minimum gambling age is 21 (including Native American casinos), there are bingo variety slot machine casinos where you only have to be at least 18 to play (same as tournament bingo). The slot machines' winning combination is determined by the outcome of your current bingo card rather than just the slot spin, meaning that you're playing the bingo card upon activation of a spin, thus lowering the legal age.
• There are a number of blind spots where some places in the United States lack any law specifically forbidding underage strippers from performing live.
• Ain't no rule saying states can't award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
  • There is, however, a rule that States can't form Compacts or Agreements without the consent of Congress.^note There is an argument that Congressional approval isn't needed for the NPVIC based upon Virginia v. Tennessee (1893) - short version is that Congressional approval is only needed for compacts that would otherwise increase the power of the states at the expense of the federal government, and such a pact wouldn't because the election of Electoral College members is explicitly a power of the states. Nonetheless, NPVIC organizers have stated they plan on seeking approval from Congress to make the whole thing more palatable.
  • For that matter, there ain't no rule saying that you have to vote for a member of the electoral college based on who they'll vote for. The intent was for you to vote for someone smart enough to know who really should be president, but no state does that anymore.
    • In fact, many states have "faithless elector" laws, which force the elector to vote for the person they stated they would when nominated. Failing to do so has happened only a couple of times in history (and never seriously affected the outcome of the election), but most states now have done the Obvious Rule Patch, something which the Supreme Court upheld in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020).
• The filibuster, in which a politician prevents a bill from being voted on by extending debate indefinitely. It's actually as old as the Roman Republic. In the United States Senate, there was originally no intention for the filibuster to be allowed. But the original Senate rules, completely by accident, were written in a way that allowed it. It took decades for any Senator to take advantage of this fact. By the time it became a significant problem that Senators would try to use the filibuster to outright block rather than merely delay votes, the filibuster had become a long-established Senate tradition and thus, instead of abolishing it the Senate simply established a rule where if a large majority agrees that it's time to vote, debate can be ended against the will of those filibustering. But this still means that if a significant minority agree to the filibuster, they can maintain it indefinitely. Also, when the threshold for breaking a filibuster was lowered from a 2/3rds vote to 3/5ths, the Senate inadvertently also made it possible to indefinitely block a bill without actually having to filibuster. If the proponents of the bill can't muster a 3/5ths vote to proceed, the mere threat of a filibuster is just as effective as actually holding the floor and talking constantly. And a lot less effort. Once again, it took a while before the loophole was discovered, but in recent years it's been increasingly abused. And in fact, it really doesn't even need to go that far. What the media and the public often hear of as the "threat of a filibuster" on a particular Senate vote is in reality something far more simple and far easier to implement. When trying to pass a law for which a quote/unquote "filibuster" has been threatened, the opposing party will vacate the chamber, except for one representative who will then continually suggest the absence of a quorum. This forces the presiding officer to conduct a quorum call and take attendance, which can take anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes and that's if a full quorum can be rounded up. A vast, vast majority of Senate business takes place with fewer than ten Senators on the floor at any given time, handing very routine matters with suggested unanimous consent on the understanding that other Senators are busy with committee meetings and other tasks; with one roadblocking Senator continually suggesting a quorum's absence on the floor, the full Senate would have to be continually present to vote on every procedural bill and confirm every deputy postmaster to Bumf***, Kentucky and its work would grind to a standstill. In this way, the threatened "filibuster" is less a brick wall and more of an anchor; not stopping the important bill that is being protested but bringing everything else to a screeching halt.
• The mandatory census and regular redrawing of voting districts in the US results in a flavor of abuse, Gerrymandering (CGP Grey provides a good, short explanation). While there are rules in place that prevent gerrymandering based on race, there are no such restrictions when it comes to party-based gerrymandering.
• The Westboro Baptist Church:
  • They go around protesting funerals for gay people ("Matthew Shepard In Hell", for example) or funerals for military soldiers. As their protests are all held in public places, not on private property, this is entirely legal. Additionally, they only scream insults while they are protesting. If you actually walk up to Fred Phelps or his family while they're out on the street, they're known to answer you very politely and respectfully (although the politeness comes with a lot of anti-gay enthusiasm, as shown by a BBC reporter that once did a documentary on them). That means if their insults during protests get to you and you punch them in the face, they have legal grounds to sue you for assault. In fact, there's a theory saying the WBC is merely a money-making scheme: everything the WBC does is (barely) legal, but incredibly offensive, so that people will attack the Phelps family (the majority of which are lawyers) and they can sue for damages. Notably, however, deliberately provoking someone into attacking you is known as "fighting words" and is considered a breach of the peace, and therefore illegal. That said, mere offensiveness is insufficient to prove fighting words; they must be trying to deliberately provoke you into attacking them, not simply stating an unpopular opinion.
  • The loophole works both ways. Ain't no rule that in a public place people can't put themselves between Westboro and their targets. Notably Patriot Guard Riders, a motorcycle group dedicated to respecting fallen heroes and grieving families alike.
• In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission implemented the National Do-Not-Call Registry, which allows Americans to limit the number of telemarketing calls made to them. However, phone surveyors are one group exempt from this rule, allowing groups like the Christian non-profit organization The Dove Foundation — known for the "family-approved" seal it puts on movies appropriate for family audiences (and not to be confused with the brand of soap made by Unilever or the brand of chocolate made by Mars^†known as Galaxy in the UK, Ireland, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt and the Middle East) — to do phone surveys and ask for a follow-up call afterwards from their for-profit partner Feature Films for Families, where they try to sell movies to them. That way, they are able to skirt the Do-Not-Call rule. The State of Missouri sued Dove for US$70,000 in 2006 for violating their laws. Melissa Joan Hart sued Dove for $180,000 in 2015 for putting "Not Recommended for Families" on other movies. Here's what Kirsten Dunst says about The Dove Foundation: "I think The Dove Foundation is one of the worst family friendly organizations. They deserve to be punished for putting "Not Recommended for Families" on each movie they review so they deserve to have a major demerit once and for all. They deserve to erase their annoying "family-approved" seal on 2 of those movies and place them on other movies."
  • Likewise, the "Do Not Call" list also doesn't apply to political campaigns, so every two years people complain about getting robocallers late at night or very early morning. This is especially bad every presidential campaign, peaking in 2008/2012 where people reported having getting so many calls at the worst times (especially around when they're eating dinner) that people reportedly unplugged all the phones in their house so they could get a good night's sleep for once.
• In politics, those who hold an executive office are often given the power to selectively veto only parts of a bill without vetoing the whole thing. This has been often used to veto individual words or sentences to Quote Mine a bill and create a different bill, for example by deleting the word "not" to completely reverse the meaning.
  • Wisconsin governors are particularly infamous for doing this - former governor Tommy Thompson was known for deleting individual letters and digits, which came to be known as the "Vanna White veto". The Wisconsin legislature has since managed to create two Obvious Rule Patches which disallow the governor from using the veto to delete letters within a word or splice together multiple sentences, but to this day, the governor of Wisconsin can still delete individual words in a sentence.
    • However, these rule patches didn't cover "digits". This became significant again in 2023, when an education funding bill came to the desk of Democratic governor Tony Evers. The original text called for a $325-per-student spending increase to end in 2024–25. Evers' veto struck "20" and the dash, which extended the end date to 2425. Legal challenges were expected. In fairness, Republicans were also guilty of this; the aforementioned Thompson was a Republican, and former GOP governor Scott Walker used it to extend the life of a state program from 2018 to 3018, also delaying the start of another program by 60 years.
  • The United States Congress once tried to give the President this power, but the power, known as the line-item veto, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Interestingly, the line item veto was one of the few things that the Confederate constitution had and the US constitution hadn't. Otherwise it was similar (apart from that whole slavery thing).
• Boise, Idaho has (or had) a law forbidding public nudity unless it has "serious artistic merit". A strip bar attempted to circumvent it by issuing pencils and paper to the clients.
• Homeowners' associations are a special case: because they're considered private, voluntary organizations, they're free to make their own (often quite restrictive) rules compared to the rules regarding public property or public-serving places (e.g. restaurants, etc.)... but these too become subject to loophole abuse, and are notorious for being exploited by vindictive or Jerkass Rules Lawyer property owners.
• There are many cases in which an action is illegal by law, or a government agency is required by law to do something, but there is no recourse or penalty for violating said law, resulting in the law freely being broken for lack of consequences.
  • A specific example recurs in Washington State, where the state legislature is required, by the state constitution, to fully fund public education as its top priority; however, no one, not even the state Supreme Court, has the power (or any means by which) to force it to actually do that.
  • Likewise, a similar case exists within Congress, which is legally required to pass a budget each year (not just "continuing resolutions" which are, in effect, "keep doing it as we did last year" legislation). However, as it is not specified exactly what a "budget" law is, and that no penalty for failure to do so is stipulated, the last several years the Senate has been abusing this loophole gratuitously.
  • In a particularly interesting case, the US law making it illegal for minors to view pornography on the Internet was ruled illegal to enforce the instant it was passed.
  • Occasionally lawmakers will invoke this deliberately in situations where a full repeal of the law is impossible or impractical, thus engaging in Loophole Abuse in their own right. For example, the Affordable Care Act required all Americans to purchase health insurance unless they met specific criteria for exemption, and specified a penalty of 2.5% of gross income or $695 for anyone who did not do so. When Republicans took power in 2017, they would have needed 60 votes in the Senate to outright repeal that, which they didn't have. However, under a process called reconciliation, any matters which only affect the income or expenditures of the federal government can be passed with a simple majority. So, they kept the requirement to purchase health insurance, but changed the penalty for not doing so to $0.
• More legal Loophole Abuse, Walmart. While this practice is hardly unique to Walmart, they just happen to be the most well-known example of it. The practice in question are to skirting around labor laws.
  • "Walmart full time": In North America, 40 hours is considered full-time legally. They claim to be hiring you for a "full-time" position, and then make you work 36-39 hours a week. Enough to feel like a full time (which actually is full-time in parts of the world, see below) but legally, you are still considered part-time and therefore you are not entitled to any benefits. A lot of Walmart employees are actually eligible for food-stamps and other such public services because they don't hire anyone full-time unless they're a manager or higher-up. This is becoming harder as the US Federal Government is now specifying anything of 30 hours or more as a "Full Time Equivalent" position, particularly in regards to the Affordable Care Act (i.e. "ObamaCare") and slowly updating the rest of the labor laws for consistency. In turn, working 29 hours is becoming the new Loophole Abuse.
  • Ain't No Rule against bumping people who worked legal-full time down to "Walmart full time" after they worked at the store long enough to qualify for more benefits.
  • This has happened to other firms and not just Walmart. Depending on where in North America you live, if you work for four hours, you are required to be given a 15-minute break. Many businesses also use a computer system that keeps track of this. However, there Ain't No Rule against the manager telling you to clock out and then clock back in so the computer doesn't record them of being on the clock more than four hours at a time and saying they need to take a break. There also Ain't No Rule against giving you split shifts; but to be fair, many businesses do split shifts so that the "Break" is actually an hour or more and you aren't paid. Or a shift 6 hours and 45 minutes long to avoid union rules that a 7-hour shift gets a half-hour break. However, unions, not being bound by these, have a tendency to call strikes if it gets out of hand.
  • There's all sorts of Loophole Abuse surrounding overtime...
  • In an "At-Will Employment" state (which is almost all of them), you can be fired for pretty much whatever reason and it will pretty much never be questioned by courts. Even though there are laws against firing someone for being a member of a "protected class", it is explicitly legal to fire anyone for literally no reason, or at least over some minor infraction (e.g. "I totally didn't fire him because he is gay, I fired him because he missed a tiny spot while mopping the floor."). So if you happen to be a member of a protected class, and your ex-boss didn't say why they fired you, it's rather difficult to prove your case in court. Not impossible, but difficult. Similarly, a company cannot fire an employee for reporting cases of misconduct, abuse, harassment, or other harmful or illegal activity (such as No OSHA Compliance), as that would be considered retaliation, which is against federal law. Again, Ain't No Rule that a company can't just stay silent about why they're terminating you, or find some other excuse.
  • Overtime is legally defined as working more than eight hours in one day or 40 hours in one week. However, the number of hours worked in one week is determined by how many hours you worked from the start of the work week (usually Monday) to the end of it. Therefore, if an employer's week begins on a Monday, for example, ain't no rule that they can't schedule someone who works eight-hour days to work from Wednesday to Friday next week; that's 10 days in a row, but because they're only working 40 hours per work week, the employer doesn't have to pay them overtime.
• Another common Loophole Abuse that is pretty widespread, but Walmart is notorious for, a practice called "constructive discharge". Most companies would rather have inexperienced and cheaper workers instead of skilled, and more expensive ones. If an employee is fired without cause (i.e. not for actually doing something wrong), they're entitled to unemployment benefits. However, if the company wants to avoid paying you, they decide to make your life miserable through manipulation of the rules that you will be forced to quit. This has changed over the years, however, as constructive discharges are now considered valid for the purposes of receiving unemployment; if you can demonstrate that your employer deliberately made your work environment so awful that anyone would have been motivated to quit, you can collect. It can be risky in the US if the targeted employee is a member of a protected class (which, for better or for worse, is very frequently the case), as they can easily file a complaint with the EEOC alleging discrimination if that occurs; while that alone has so-so chances of turning anything up, any further negative action taken by the employer can be construed as retaliation, and that frequently does result in successful claims with outcomes that favor the employee.
• If you are hired as a waiter or waitress in most states, legally you're allowed to have a paycheck below minimum wage. However, the loophole is that you must be able to make up the difference in tips. This hasn't stopped some places from hiring everyone as a waiter simply so they could get away with paying them $2.50 an hour... and subsequently getting blacklisted by the working force when word gets out.^note This is a state-by-state item. Some states, such as Washington, legally demand minimum wage for such jobs. Some places that do this try for damage control by pooling the tips that servers make between everyone they hire at that wage, with varying levels of success.
• California gun laws stipulate that you cannot have a removable magazine on a firearm with "assault weapon" features, such as pistol grips, collapsible stocks, flash hiders, etc. However, California defines a "removable magazine" as one that can be removed without a tool. To get around this, gun manufacturers made the "bullet button" magazine release. All you have to do is get an unfired round, press it against a tiny button that is flush against some housing so you can't use your finger, and the magazine pops out. This gets around having removable magazines on "assault weapons" because you're technically using a tool to remove the magazine. Inevitably, someone started selling a tool that consisted of a button secured via magnet in place over the bullet button release, effectively turning it into a conventional magazine release despite not being a part of the weapon.
• In most of the United States, prostitution is illegal. You'd think this would put the kibosh on porn movies where paid performers have sex. However, technically pornographers don't pay their actors to have sex; the pay for the right to film the actors having sex, while the sex act itself is something the actors theoretically do of their own accord. Yes, this line of reasoning actually held up in court.
  • One slick way (pun intended) that this occurs is through "massage parlors" that offer "customizable experiences." In such places, the customer pays to rent a room and have a massage. When the masseuse gets there, the customer 'leaves a tip' of differing denominations on a table. The tip signifies what services they actually want ($100 for a fully nude attendant, $150 for fellatio, etc.) The attendant picks up and counts the 'tip' and proceeds to engage in whatever activity the customer didn't specifically pay for. As long as no one mentions the word sex, it's an entirely legitimate business model.
  • A similar case in the US is for certain high-end escort arrangements. You pay the escort agency for the time you spend with the escort, NOT for any specific action. Sex is at the discretion (and choice) of the escort, though any time having sex is "on the clock" and thus is paid to the agency. The "Girlfriend Experience" concept is explicitly set up to take advantage of this loophole, as sex is not part of the arrangement (but often implicitly assumed).
• The tax code. There are plenty of loopholes that stop some rich people from paying many taxes.
  • The Alternative Minimum Tax in the U.S. is at least one attempt to patch the tax code to limit this sort of abuse, but the tax rate is still lower than the normal tax rate (it is, after all, a minimum tax), and, well....
  • US citizens are required to pay US income tax regardless of whether they live in the US or not (though in at lease some cases they can use taxes paid to the country they're actually resident in to offset their US tax liabilities).
• Obscene material was illegal, unless it had artistic value. Plots and music were added in order to be considered artistic. The plot was often that a pizza delivery guy or pool boy visited a housewife while her husband was away. The music often sounded like "Bow Chicka Wow Wow". If you ever wondered why so many porno movies have such stupid and flimsy Excuse Plots, now you know.
• The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare because of a loophole. Congress didn't want to be accused of "raising taxes", so the charge for going uninsured was called a "penalty" under commerce clause powers. The Court held political labels didn't matter and it was a constitutional tax. They did it again with another loophole. After repeatedly failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act (not that they really could do so, as Senate Democrats would immediately filibuster the repeal bill even if it passed), the Republican-controlled Congress used the 'tax and budget exemption' to the filibuster (itself a loophole) to reduce the aforementioned penalty to $0, thinking this would cause the legislation to fall apart, as people wouldn't sign up for coverage without a penalty for not doing so. When that failed to happen, Republican state Attorneys General filed suit, claiming that the insurance mandate was an unconstitutional burden. The Supreme Court ruled that since the penalty for not following the mandate had been reduced to zero, it didn't burden anybody and the law could stand.
• In several cases regarding Guantanamo Bay, the US Supreme Court ruled that the base is technically part of the United States (though they didn't clarify what exactly its status is), and therefore the inmates were entitled the protections of the Constitution. The Bush administration simply ignored these decisions, arguing that the Supreme Court had no authority to declare the base as part of the country.
• There was no rule stating a candidate couldn't run for a third term as President, but nearly everyone who won a second term either stepped down of their own accord after it in remembrance of George Washington doing the same, or simply wasn't able to stay popular enough amongst the electorate to stand a chance of winning a third election. That is, until Franklin D. Roosevelt, who managed to win himself four terms, likely due to what was going on at the time (and even then, he only planned on sticking around until the end of the war, only to die just one month before V-E Day). This led to the 22nd Amendment, which imposed a mandatory two-term-per-President limit starting from 1951.
  • There's still no rule that an American President who only serves one term can't run for re-election after the next President's term ends, but so far Grover Cleveland is the only one who bothered to try and actually won, hence he is the only President to have served as the head of two separate Presidencies (the 22nd and 24th).
  • Linked to both of the above, Theodore Roosevelt did try to run for a third term in 1912, after his two terms had ended in 1909 (because he wasn't too pleased with how his successor, William Howard Taft, was doing at the job), but did not win - in fact, his Bull Moose Party split the GOP vote, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win, and relegated the mainstream Republicans to a third-place slot for the only time in their history.
  • The maximum length of a Presidency is supposed to be eight years (two four-year terms as above), but it's still possible for someone to serve as President for slightly longer than that. If a President steps down, dies, or is otherwise removed from office in the middle of their term, their Vice President serves out the remainder of it - if this happens more than halfway through the term, it does not legally count as a full term for the new President, and they can go on to be (re)elected for another two full terms after finishing the current one (essentially 10 years minus a day). For this reason, it would have been possible for Lyndon Johnson to be reelected to a second full term in 1968 (he ultimately chose not to pursue the nomination), because less than half of the term remained when he took office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, Gerald Ford, had he been reelected in 1976, would not have been eligible to run for another term in 1980, because he served more than half a term after Richard Nixon's resignation.
• Theodore Roosevelt was fond of this, saying "do what you can, with what you've got, where you are" was the best lesson he ever learned.
  • As the police commissioner of New York City in 1895, Roosevelt heard that an anti-Semite named Rector Ahlwardt was coming to preach his bigotry in the city. While Roosevelt could legally not stop Ahlwardt from speaking, he devised a plan to discredit the anti-Semitism anyway. Roosevelt had every Jewish officer in the NYPD assigned to guard Ahlwardt during the speech, and sent letters to every newspaper in the city declaring what he had done, since there was legally nothing stopping him from doing that, either. The result was that Ahlwardt was made into a laughingstock, and fled back to where he came from, humiliated.
  • When Roosevelt was President of the United States, he was approached by a group of wealthy men who had a plan to "improve" the Grand Canyon by building a railroad, hotels, and billboards in it. Roosevelt, a staunch conservationist, fiercely objected to the idea and said he would declare the Grand Canyon a National Park so the men couldn't build there. But, Roosevelt didn't have the legal authority to declare something was a National Park. So instead, Roosevelt used the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to declare that the floor of the Grand Canyon a National Bird Sanctuary, and used the Antiquities Act of 1907 to make the walls of the Grand Canyon a National Monument. As a result, both areas of the Grand Canyon were legally protected from ever having anything built on them.
• At the turn of the 20th century, the law in Atlantic County, NJ declared that the same person couldn't succeed themselves as Sheriff. Smith Johnson served as Sheriff, and when his time was up, became under-Sheriff. Then he became Sheriff again, since he wasn't technically succeeding himself. He kept doing this until his retirement more than 20 years later, upon which his son Enoch of Boardwalk Empire fame, who had been acting as under-Sheriff for his father, succeeded him as Sheriff.
• Some US states have different term limits when it comes to their governors. Some states have absolute term limits, others limit the number of consecutive terms one can serve, while other states have no limits at all.
  • Virginia, for instance, doesn't allow governors to succeed themselves - they serve one four-year term, but can be up for election in the next gubernatorial race after they leave office. This was relatively common in Southern states that had four-year terms until at least the 1970s.
  • Vermont and New Hampshire governors can serve an unlimited number of terms; however, unlike most governorships, terms in those two states only last two years.
  • In the 1960s, the Governor of Alabama could not succeed themselves after one four-year term. In the 1966 gubernatorial election, then-incumbent governor George Wallace had his wife Lurleen run. While Mrs. Wallace was the de jure Governor of Alabama until her death 16 months into her term, it served as Mr. Wallace's de facto second term. The Alabama State Constitution was amended in 1968 to allow for two consecutive terms, and Mr. Wallace would later be elected to serve two terms properly in the 1970s, then after being term-limited for the 1978 election, he was elected for his fourth and final term in 1982.
• If US state governors don't want to sign a bill that has passed through the state legislature, but they also don't want to veto it and kill the bill, they let it "lapse into law": after a certain amount of time without action, the bill is automatically passed as if the governor had signed it, even though they did not. The President has this power, as well, although it is conditioned on when they refuse/neglect to sign or veto; if Congress is still in session after ten days (minus Sundays), the bill becomes law, but if Congress is adjourned on the tenth day then the bill is "pocket vetoed" and does not become law, and there is no opportunity to override the veto. The latter is more common than the former, since Congress adjourns a lot.
  • However, there is nothing stopping Congress from engaging in their own Loophole Abuse by holding sessions during the extended recesses which are only a few minutes in length, conduct no business, and are only attended by members who represent areas close to the District of Columbia. This also has the effect of preventing the President from making recess appointments without Congress’s approval.
• Thanks to France and West Germany imposing a tariff on U.S. chicken imports during the 1960s, a 25 percent tariff on foreign imports of potato starch, brandy, dextrin, and light trucks was imposed in the U.S. in 1964, hurting sales of the latter. However, many companies got around this by removing the truck bed and exporting it separately with the cab (though this part would be closed around 1980) or converting it to a "passenger vehicle". The light truck part of the Chicken Tax still remains to this very day.
  • In the 1980s, Subaru imported the not-for-Japan coupe utility version of the Leone called the BRAT by installing two detachable seats and carpeting in the bed so the vehicle can be classified as a "passenger vehicle".
  • From 2010 until 2022, Ford only imported the passenger version of the Transit Connect van from Europe to North America. For cargo models, the rear seats and seat belts are removed and the rear quarter glass is replaced with solid metal panels after the vehicle clears customs. The conversion process costs Ford several hundred dollars per van but saves thousands compared to paying the Chicken Tax by directly importing cargo vans. Chrysler uses the same post-import conversion method for their Ram ProMaster City, an Americanized version of the Fiat Doblo. The US government is looking to close the "post-import conversion" loophole, which seems more likely now as both Ford and Ram discontinued sales of their respective small vans in the US and Canada by 2023.
  • Another method of circumventing the Chicken Tax is to import light trucks in knockdown form^note vehicles shipped either completely unassembled or partially assembled. For example, components for North American Mercedes-Benz/Freightliner Sprinter cargo vans are made and partially assembled in Germany, and the unfinished chassis and powertrain are shipped separately to South Carolina for final assembly. However, Mercedes-Benz decided to build US-spec Sprinters entirely in South Carolina, starting with model year 2019.
  • Japanese mini-trucks can be legally imported and registered as off-road utility vehicles, avoiding the Chicken Tax. Depending on the state, such vehicles will often have their top speed limited, usually to 25 to 35 miles per hour (40 to 55 km/h). Also, legal on-road operation varies by state, although states which allow mini-trucks to be operated on public roadways prohibit them on Interstate and other high-speed access-controlled highways. Importing Japanese mini-trucks as off-road utility vehicles also skirts the 25-year age requirement for importing foreign road-legal vehicles not meeting Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) regulations.
  • Mere months after the Chicken Tax passed (January 1965 to be exact), Canada was exempted from its truck taxes by the Canada–United States Automotive Products Agreement, better known as the Auto Pact, which created a free-trade zone for the two countries' automotive industries. While the Auto Pact expired in 2001, it had already been superseded by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which also included Mexico. Under both NAFTA and its successor, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), light trucks assembled either in Mexico or Canada since 1994 are not subject to the 25% import tariff, so long as at least 75% of the vehicle's components originates in one of the three countries. Ford, GM, Chrysler, and Toyota use this exemption to build some of their pickup trucks and commercial vans in Mexico.
• In the U.S. car dealerships are prohibited from selling cars with roll cages or racing harnesses as road cars, the government deems them race cars and not suitable for public roads. Porsche makes (in very limited numbers) a line of "RS" cars, which are basically full on GT3 cars (including the roll cage and harness) with turn signals. This presented a problem for Porsche... until they realized that while they can't sell the car with the racing equipment already in it there's no law preventing them from installing those parts into a car that a customer has already purchased.^note Nor is it illegal to drive a car with those parts on public roads, at least according to federal law. The Dodge Demon (an 800 HP version of the Challenger) took a similar tactic by selling a normal looking car and offering a $1 "drag crate" as an option, which was literally a wooden crate full of all the fun stuff you'd need at your local dragstrip.
• The US Constitution states that all congressional legislators "shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same." The latter part of the clause has the effect of making Senators and Representatives immune from traffic citations while they are traveling to or from a congressional session as such violations are neither felonies nor a breach of the peace. Considering the intent is to prevent a member of Congress from getting something passed by having all the opponents detained, however, this isn't exactly a loophole.
  • In 2007, Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) famously tried to avoid being charged for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom by pointing out he was waiting for a plane that was heading to DC, and then invoking this rule.
• Horrifying combo of this, Exact Words, and Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: In the documentary Slavery By Another Name, African-Americans in the Deep South were forced into servitude for decades after the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation under the guise of prison labor (in mines that happened to be owned by ex-slave owners) or being forced to pay "debts" that never existed. The worst part was that while "slaves were an investment prisoners were disposable". The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly bans slavery "except as a punishment for crime", so there's still nothing stopping this sort of thing from happening even today. At the time, it was very easy for all-white law enforcement and all-white juries to arrest and convict black people on flimsy pretenses.
  • The intention of the loophole was to allow existing chain gangs to still work. Because of this and other abuses, as well as a shortage of tasks a chain gang could actually accomplish efficiently, this practice has been mostly discontinued.
• In July 2013, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "Sugary Drinks Portion Cap Rule", colloquially known as the "Big Gulp Ban", would have prohibited the sale of sugary drinks, both bottled and fountain, exceeding 16 fluid ounces/500 mL by restaurants and other food service establishments (e.g., cafeterias, movie theaters, sports stadiums, street vendors, etc.); however, the law was overturned by a New York State Supreme Court judge^note This isn't as impressive as it sounds, as the New York Supreme Court is actually its lower court of general jurisdiction. The highest court of New York is the Court of Appeals. on the day before the ban was to go into effect. The law was riddled with so many confusing and contradictory loopholes and exemptions, it was considered unenforceable.
  • Grocery and convenience stores were not included in the ban, since they are regulated at the state level by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets and not locally by the New York City Department of Health. This meant that 7-Eleven, as a convenience store chain, could still legally sell its (in)famous "Big Gulp"-sized drinks in NYC.
  • Alcoholic beverages were exempt from the ban. Dairy beverages which contain at least 50% milk or another dairy product as well as any drink with at least 70% fruit juice were also exempt from the ban.
  • What ultimately killed the ban was that the fact that limits on drink purchases and fountain refills were left to the discretion of individual food service operators. If an operator had no such restrictions, consumers could easily defeat the ban's intent (ex., buying two 16-ounce drinks rather than a single 32-ounce drink).
• Possibly the most universal legal Loophole Abuse is the "one dollar less than the retainer" trick, where a company threatens to sue another unless they agree to settle out of court for a relatively small amount of money or profit share. The threatened company may feel obliged to pay because if a suit is filed - even a baseless one - the time and money required to contest the suit in court could easily cost much more or even destroy the business. Meanwhile, the threatening business is quite safe, since they are under no obligation to actually proceed with the threatened lawsuit if the target calls their bluff. In this way it is possible for a company or individual to make a business model out of claiming for damages for a case which has no legal validity at all.
• In July 2013, the NY Times broke a story about Goldman-Sachs hoarding and manipulating the prices on the Aluminum market^note  It's estimated that G-S holds 25% of ALL aluminum inventory in the US. This led to the warehouses they owned slowing outflow to a crawl, going from an expected turn-around time of 6 weeks to 16 months over the course of 2 years. However, the London Metal Exchange has a regulation stating that warehouses need to move a certain amount of product each day. Goldman's solution? Move the product from one warehouse they own to another in one of the biggest shell-games in recent history.
• US Prisons have a ban on drugs, especially alcohol, forcing inmates to tough it out although drug programs are common to deal with this while those on medication have theirs mentioned. Despite the ban on alcohol, the materials to make a kind of drink known as Pruno are mandatory because of the nutritional needs of the inmates.
  • You heard right. Fruits, potatoes, sugar, milk and breads are commonly used to make the alcohol by putting the concoction under running hot water and concealing it with a towel during the fermentation process. Prison guards often seized any amount found and tried to limited fresh fruits but that hasn’t stop inmates from getting creative and finding alternatives.
  • A related loophole concerns drug rehab programs. Many states have a blanket offer to inmates of time off their sentences by finishing a drug treatment program. This led some inmates who had never taken drugs to enter the program for time off their sentences.
• Thanks to how the First Amendment of the United States is written, a school system in America doesn't technically give its students the right to free speech. Keep in mind, the school can only do this within the school system itself. Things like local newspapers, social media or cyberspace gives the students the last word as long as threats aren't being made. This is due to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which also protects property owners, since a student's social media account is classified as property^note The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
  • However, schools have their own loophole with this. If a student complains about a teacher, or otherwise expresses their feelings without personal threats of violence, they're safe if they do it on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Whatever they say can't get them in trouble with the law, but it might get them in trouble with the school, since the student willingly posted it to the public. In other words, assuming they aren't making a threat, what a student posts on Facebook can't get him arrested, but it might get him detention. However, cyber-bullying does fall under the threat of violence, at which point the law can intervene.
  • The initial loophole was also significantly limited by the Supreme Court's 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines, which ruled that students do not, in fact, "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate"^note this applies exclusively to public schools; private schools, not being government-run institutions, get more leeway. However, the Tinker ruling included a loophole of its own: the ruling says that schools can prohibit activities that "materially disrupt" the educational process. While some things would still clearly cross the line (including the specific instance in play in the Tinker case, where students were disciplined simply for wearing anti-war symbols), the wording creates a big potential gray area.
• Lawmakers in Pennsylvania try to clamp down on synthetic drug makers after they managed to find loopholes in drug laws, like labeling their products “Not for Human Consumption”. It such comes as no surprise that law enforcements in other US states have caught on thanks to “legal” alternatives, like Salvia divinorum and spice… synthetic cannabis since it looks like the spice used in cooking.
  • Some students in Oklahoma were maybe to get around the drug policy at their school by opting for a digital form for their MP3 player known as I-Dose… yes, a digital replacement that doesn’t show up on a drug test yet give the same effects without using the “real thing”. The school tried to stop this by banning MP3 player usage in schools.
• In the 1970s, a study came out suggesting that the fatty acid erucic acid was dangerous to heart health, and the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of vegetable oils high in erucic acid as food in the United States. The study has since been contradicted by later ones showing little or no effect on heart health, but the FDA ban remains. This has become a problem for immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent (especially eastern India and Bangladesh) where mustard seed oil—which is high in erucic acid—is a foundational cooking fat, on a par with olive oil in Italy or butter in France. The pungent flavor it imparts was important enough to some Indian immigrants that they began looking for a loophole, and they found one: the FDA's ban only applied to the sale of mustard seed oil as food; it could still be legally sold if there was a legitimate non-cooking application of the oil. As it happens, the oil is used in traditional Bengali massage, and it has some other cultural and ritual uses as well (for instance, some Hindus use it to fuel their lamps for Diwali). The FDA therefore ruled that mustard oil could be sold if labeled "For External Use Only"...which doesn't keep Desi grocers in America from selling it in bottles that look for all the world like bottles of cooking oil in the same aisle as the vegetable oil and the ghee.
• In the United States, for a beverage to be declared non-alcoholic it must contain 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or less. Due to this, in some US States, like Texas, products with this declaration including light beer can be legally sold to minors. In theory, parents in Texas can allow their teenagers to drink beer without criminal charges just as long as it's non-alcoholic.
  • In fact, while it’s still illegal for a minor to buy one that’s over 0.5 percent alcohol by volume, in some US states there’s no law saying it’s illegal for minors to drink it. In some states, like Wisconsin, it's fully legal for underage people to be served alcohol as long as they're with a parent (although establishments serving alcohol do have the right to refuse to serve minors, they're just not required to). Drinking age laws also include exceptions for religious grounds, medical reasons, employment requirement and private club possession. Minors in Illinois are allowed to drink alcohol if they're taking part in culinary classes where such drink is used.
  • Also, while rules exist regarding the age at which a person can consume alcohol, these are not always consistent with rules about the age at which a person can serve alcohol. Therefore, in many places in the US, a 20-year-old is allowed to handle alcohol in order to serve it, even though they're not yet allowed to consume it themselves.
  • Ethanol, which is pure alcohol, is still legal to buy over the counter since it’s commonly used to clean an area before blood work has to be done, and yes it hurts like hell if it makes contact with an open wound. This is because the law only blocks purchase of alcoholic beverages, and ethanol obviously isn't a beverage.
  • Speaking of medicine, it’s still legal to have some alcohol in medications, as well as some cosmetic products. Cough medicine could be legally sold over the counter until meth cookers begin to use it, forcing stricter rules like limiting how much one can have. This is also due to the creation of purple drank, cough medicine and soda mix… you can guess the outcome.
  • Though it's no longer the case on a federal level, alcohol is still banned in many Native American and Alaska Native communities. Some have tried to get around this since it’s legal in nearby cities like Anchorage, Fairbanks or Juneau and some have tried to disguise it as apple juice or drink products containing the substance.
  • The way the federal drinking age came about is also fairly wacky. You see, Congress actually has no power to dictate to the states where they set their legal drinking ages and at some point in the 1960s and 1970s some were actually lowering their legal drinking age to 18 or even lower - which is in line with what's practiced in much of the Western world and Canada - but at the same time, studies indicated that young people were particularly prone to drunk driving. The solution? Well Congress can decide who gets the money from the Interstate Highway fund as that is a federal entity, so they told states that they would only get the highway money if they raised their drinking ages to 21. It did not take long for the state laws to change.
• When it comes to CCTV cameras in school systems, many were able to get around the federal surveillance laws and were able to go with installation without parental permission because of wiretap laws. Under this, audio surveillance requires permission from a third party in locations where individuals possess a "reasonable expectation of privacy". However, outside of the school, hallways and cafeteria are considered public; therefore cameras are okay just as long the audio is muted. If a principal wants to conduct audio surveillance due to a serious criminal act in the school, he or she will still have to comply with the Fourth Amendment and obtain permission.
  • This can also explain why a student with a camera can film inside of the classroom if they get the okay from fellow classmates, though it depends on the teacher whether audio should be included.
  • Keep in mind, different states have different laws regarding what counts as a third party, usually parents and/or guardians.
  • Many businesses can employ CCTV of their own for protection, mostly against shoplifters and thieves, but they just have to warn customers about the surveillance by posting a sign. This counts as permission from a third party, thus complying with the law.
  • In 2012, Stuart Chaifetz, a parent in New Jersey, who has an autistic son, discovered that anti-bullying wasn't being enforced after seeing his son suffering at the hands of a teacher. While teachers are forbidden to physically harm students due to a law banning corporal punishment, they obviously found a loophole in verbal harm. Chaifetz had his son wiretapped and gathered the information. Chaifetz was allowed to do this under federal law because it was his son, he knew he was wiretapped and he had his consent, and New Jersey is a one-party consent state. When Chaifetz got the evidence he needed, the aide involved was fired and the teacher was suspended.
• In 2010, it was ruled that taking photos up the skirts of women was legal. One man was caught taking cell phone photos up women's skirts, and after taking a photo up the skirt of an off-duty police officer, he was busted. But rather than getting fined, sued, or labeled as a sex offender, he argued that it was legal because the women weren't in partial nudity. They were fully dressed.
  • This happened in Massachusetts in March 2014. A man convicted under "Peeping Tom" laws for taking up-skirt photos of non-consenting women on public transit won his appeal because the law only forbade taking nude or semi-nude pictures. There was so much outrage that the state legislature closed the loophole just two days later (which is what the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which had decided the case, had recommended in its opinion).
  • A similar case occurred in New Hampshire, where an individual was spotted photographing the swimsuit-clad buttocks and genital areas of young girls at an amusement park, then tried to delete the photos when park security intervened and called the police, which led to the individual admitting to pedophiliac urges and subsequently being arrested for disorderly conduct, after which the police acquired a search warrant for his home computer (as he had admitted to transferring his phone's camera roll to his computer), finding child pornography, and securing a conviction for it. This was all thrown out after the state supreme court ruled that the police had no right to arrest him in the first place, as taking creepshots, while offensive, was not actually illegal in New Hampshire, and they had no grounds to arrest him for disorderly conduct because that specifically pertained to violent or physically threatening behavior in public, not creepy behavior, and threw the whole case out, original conviction included.
    • It should be noted that the amusement park could use its own loophole. As a private business, they have the right to remove anybody, for any reason (so long as it's not discriminatory), so they could simply prohibit the guy from ever coming back.
• After running into trouble with the FCC, New York pirate radio operator Allen Weiner started trying to exploit loopholes in broadcasting regulations in the 1980s. After buying a couple of legal stations in Maine, he got a license for a remote broadcast unit for the stations. But instead of using it to feed audio to the stations in Maine, he set it up in Yonkers, New York and used it to broadcast to the general public. The FCC said that was a violation of the license and yanked Weiner's license for the remote unit and the stations in Maine. Taking a cue from the British pirate stations of the 1960s, Weiner and others concocted a plan to broadcast from a boat anchored a few miles off the coast, technically in international waters, which they claimed would be out of the jurisdiction of the FCC. The station, RNI (Radio Newyork International), debuted with great fanfare, but the FCC disagreed with their interpretation of the law and enlisted the Coast Guard to raid the ship after a few days. Eventually the FCC gave in and gave Weiner a license for his shortwave station WBCQ.
• Sales of liquor and wine in Pennsylvania are a state-run monopoly, and beer can only be sold by the drink or at licensed "beer distributors" that (historically) could only sell cases and kegs. This means that grocery stores can't stock alcohol except for cooking, disinfectants, and the like. However, bars and restaurants licensed to serve beer and wine can sell six-packs of beer and (with the proper approvals) bottles of wine for takeout. This traditionally led to an entire industry of "beer delis" that have a sandwich counter, some sundries, and a seating area that allows themselves to be deemed "restaurants" and thus allowed to sell six-packs and single bottles of beer. Later, some supermarket chains such as Wegmans and Whole Foods used this to sidestep the monopoly by converting portions of their stores into restaurants, getting them licensed to serve beer and wine to restaurant patrons, then declaring their six-packs to be "takeout" beverages. Since about 2012, however, the government in Pennsylvania has gone about regularizing and expanding these exceptions and formally making them new, expected ways to sell beer and wine (over the vehement but little-heeded objections of the lobby representing beer distributors^note Who were largely bought off by being allowed to sell sub-case amounts of beer; as of 2019, they are allowed to sell beer in any standard form (kegs, cases, 15-packs, 12-packs, 6-packs, 4-packs, and single cans/bottles). and beer delis and the union representing workers at the state wine and liquor monopoly).
• One of the requirements to serving as a Senator is being 30 years or older upon entering office. Joe Biden was shy of 30 when he was first elected Senator of Delaware in 1972, turning 30 between Election Day and when he was sworn in.
• Legendary comics creator Gerry Conway has documented how the DC Entertainment legal department is screwing over their creators by coming up with an ingenious way to ensure that the artists and writers aren't being compensated for the use of the characters they create. First, they declare that a character is a "derivative" of another character, so the creators don't get any credit for the new character and thus don't receive a compensation payment for its use (outside of what they're paid for their own work). But the creators of the original character also don't get any credit because they only created the original character, not the derived one. So, officially, there's no one who created the new character according to the policy, therefore DC doesn't have to pay a share of the revenue coming from the use of that character.
  • To understand what this means, the example Gerry used concerned the villain Killer Frost. The original Killer Frost, Crystal Frost, was created by Gerry and Al Milgrom. Caitlin Snow, the Killer Frost of The New 52 and supporting character in The Flash (2014) was created by Sterling Gates and Derlis Santacruz. In DC's logic, Gerry and Al are co-creators of not only the original Killer Frost, but also the new Killer Frost in all incarnations. Thus, Sterling and Derlis are screwed out of royalties for creating Caitlin as she is a "derivative" of Crystal. However, while Gerry and Al are Crystal's creators, they also claim that they didn't create Caitlin Snow, thus they are screwed out of any royalties, right or wrong. Confused and angry? You're not the only one.
• Daily fantasy sports was just one loophole after another. In the U.S., gambling is defined by state laws, with federal laws restricting interstate wagering and electronic transfers of funds in connection to gambling that is illegal under state law. The definition of a game of chance varies by state, but paid competitions in traditional season-length fantasy sports are generally considered (well, in most states) to be a game of skill because of the challenge of having to manage your players over a long-term period. DFS, a version of the concept that uses only a single day/week of competition in a given sport, became popular in The New '10s: politicians have argued that DFS, unlike season-length fantasy, is gambling because its essentially wagering on the performance of athletes in a specific game. The multi-billion dollar DFS industry denies this opinion because they consider themselves to be a game of skill, as is traditional fantasy sports. At the same time, they promote themselves as if they are gambling services, flaunting increasingly large cash prizes. They also cite that the federal ban on funds transfers for gambling states that pay-to-play fantasy sports contests with pre-determined prizes were not gambling. However, as state laws override this carve-out, its basically symbolic. Plus, said law predates the concept of DFS, and its author has stated that it's not meant to be a carte blanche for this particular industry. More and more U.S. states are beginning to see through this smoke screen and explicitly rule that DFS is gambling, or on the other hand, carve out specific regulations for DFS as a legal form of skill-based gambling (such as Massachusetts, and New York — where DraftKings and FanDuel were involved in a lawsuit against the Attorney General over the legality of DFS).
  • In October 2015, it was exposed that employees of the two largest DFS sites—who are not eligible to participate in their service's own contests, were using privileged internal information to play in and win money from each other. This came to an end quickly, but set the stage for a general legal dispute over the legality of DFS in the state of New York.
  • These points started to become moot in 2018: another key reason for all the hoop-jumping was because federal law (with a few exceptions for areas like Nevada) actually forbade states from implementing laws that legalized sports wagering. Thanks to a lawsuit by the state of New Jersey, this law has since been declared unconstitutional; the DFS companies promptly began to expand into legal sportsbooks where possible, hoping that their name recognition would carry over.
• When William Friedkin wanted to do a digital restoration of his film Sorcerer (famously killed by bad marketing) he was held up by the distribution contract: Universal distributed the film domestically, and Paramount internationally, and neither company thought the film was worth digging through the appropriate paperwork to figure out who the rights currently belonged to. So, Friedkin filed a lawsuit for withheld royalties from the film. At this point the film hadn't been released in any capacity in years, and there were no royalties to dispute, but the very fact that a lawsuit had been filed meant the companies were legally required to figure out who owned the movie, so that Friedkin could sue the correct party.
• Some technology firms hire software developers as contractors. The idea is that since they don't technically work for the company, they don't have to give the developer any benefits (among other things like minimizing administration costs). However, in the US, the IRS set some pretty strict guidelines of defining if an employee works for the company or is a contractor, regardless of hiring agreements. This hits companies hard whenever the IRS does an audit.
• A lot of what the federal government of the US does, has done in the past and probably will do in the future is an abuse of one specific loophole. You see, the Constitution grants the right to regulate trade between the several states to the federal government, which on the face of it is pretty reasonable. However, this so-called interstate commerce clause has been used to justify pretty much any law that the federal government may or may not actually have had the power to pass otherwise. Usually it goes like this: Do we want to have a federal regulation? Is there some way we can say this has to do with Interstate Commerce? Great, let's pass the law. And the courts have not helped stop the abuse by ruling that entirely intrastate activities are "interstate commerce" if it has a potential to affect interstate commerce regulated by the federal government (with definition of "commerce" expanded much beyond what it meant before the 1900s).
• In 2012, a New York State court ruled that it was legal to view child pornography as long as one didn't "possess" it (i.e., by downloading it). Image caching by a web browser did not count as possession. The Obvious Rule Patch was put in place four months later.
• A "warrant canary" gets around rules forbidding anyone from mentioning the existence of a secret subpoena. It's simply a regularly updated statement that no such warrant has been served as of the specified date. If the statement is not updated as expected, it can then be inferred that a secret subpoena has been issued, without anyone having ever actually said so. The law forbidding mentioning of the secret subpoena doesn't apply until one is actually received, so the statement that you have not received one is legal to publish and truthfully update. The US constitution's prohibition on compelled speech prevents them from forcing you to lie by any means other then omission, so they can't stop you from letting it lapse after you have received one. While there are exceptions to the compelled speech doctrine, every court tested exception in the US requires that the compelled speech be truthful (warning labels are compelled truthful speech). Note that this applies specifically to the United States, and other country governments may be able to force you to lie and continue to say you have not received one. While The Common Law would normally allow courts to close the loophole, the First Amendment trumps the common law, and the prohibition about ex post facto prevents the law from reaching into the past.
• Some businesses in the U.S. are trying to go completely electronic in their money transactions and not accept cash. However, the federal law states that cash money is legal tender for goods and services rendered and a business is not allowed to refuse it as payment (or at least not refuse it and then claim the customer didn't pay). However, businesses still have the right to refuse service to potential customers. Thus, if you indicate beforehand that you will pay with cash and the business refuses to deal with you because of that, they are within their rights. But if they do deliver and after that you try to pay with cash, then the aforementioned federal law comes into play.
• There were many reasons why Prohibition in the United States failed. For one, the Volstead Act (the federal law banning alcohol enabled by the 18th Amendment) was to be enforced by only 1,520 federal agents tasked with covering the whole of the United States. This was only one agent per 70,000 people and thus wholly inadequate to either enforce the 18th Amendment within society or control America's vast coastline and huge unguarded borders with Mexico and Canada. What's more, the Volstead Act itself was riddled with loopholes. People were allowed to quite legally brew wine and cider for consumption at home whilst doctors were allowed to prescribe alcohol for medicinal purposes and clergymen for religious sacraments, legal technicalities which were extensively exploited and abused (see George Remus in Boardwalk Empire). Furthermore it was not actually illegal to drink alcohol, only to sell it, transport it or manufacture beer/spirits, allowing many people to quite legitimately consume whatever they had stockpiled in the period between the act passing in October 1919 and becoming law in January 1920.
  • One particularly flagrant case of loophole abuse during the era was that vineyards that had, prior to Prohibition, produced wine instead started producing bricks of concentrated grape juice, which could be reconstituted by adding water. They often came with detailed instructions about what things buyers should avoid doing so they didn't "accidentally" make wine instead.
  • Inversely, if an asshole cop wanted to ruin your day, he could arrest you for "transportation of alcohol" even if you just carried a bottle in your car or your own body, because there was no legal limit to the transportation charge.
• Puerto Rico suffered an economic crisis that was the culmination of a bunch of little legal loopholes due to its status as a U.S. territory. Loopholes that made it easier for businesses and Wall Street to plunder Puerto Rico.
• There are of course many cases of people abusing loopholes to inconvenience government officials, but one of the classics is paying a large fine in pennies. A man in Virginia did this in January of 2017, bringing 300,000 pennies to a DMV office. Because pennies are, for all intents and purposes, legal tender, the DMV was then forced to count the several wheelbarrows worth of coinage by hand. In order to bring forth the copper, the person in question spent over $1,000.
• In the United States, federal law strictly regulates conflicts of interest for federal workers. However, these laws do not apply to the President of the United States of America, instead relying on traditions and decorum—essentially, an honor system—to prevent the president from utilizing his office for personal gain. This rule is partially patched by the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government officers, including the president, from receiving gifts or other considerations from foreign governments without Congressional approval.
• The New York City Subway banned pets from riding unless they are in a carrier or a bag. Passengers have gotten increasingly creative in avoiding this, ranging from strong passengers carrying very large dogs in duffels to just cutting leg holes in an plastic bag and letting the dog walk since it's technically still in the bag. Strictly speaking, the law says that the dogs must be carried in a manner that will not annoy the other passengers, so as long as no one complains they're following the spirit of the law as well as the letter.
• The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs abused a loophole in California vehicle registration law to effectively never have a license plate on his car. California drivers had a grace period of six months to obtain registration on a new car. Jobs would simply turn over the lease on his silver Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG every six months for an identical model, resetting the grace period. Five years after Jobs' death, California lawmakers closed the loophole; starting in 2019, any new car sold or leased in the state is issued with a temporary plate and dealers have to report the sale to the California DMV.
• Tennessee has a law called the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which prohibits the removal of monuments installed on public properties in the state, including Confederate statues. In December 2017, the city of Memphis got around this by selling two of the public parks that has such statues (for Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest) to a private organization. Since they are now considered private properties, they can remove the statues legally. Both statues were removed mere hours after the sale.
  • Similar loophole abuse has been used to prevent monuments from being removed. No layer of government is allowed to endorse a particular religion, but there are plenty of Christian symbols like crosses or monuments containing the ten commandments. Courts have fairly consistently ordered state and local governments to remove the offending monument. Rather than have the religious monument be removed, the government sell the land containing the monuments, so the government is no longer directly "endorsing" the religion.
• In 2018, it was noticed that there ain't no rule saying the governor of Kansas has to be... well, anything whatsoever; the state law at the time named absolutely no qualifications for the position. This led to multiple high school students who were too young to vote, some of whom were not state residents either, to declare candidacy. Also, in the finest tradition of Loophole Abuse, a dog. Although none of these candidates got serious traction in this election, one of them won a seat in the state House of Representatives two years later.
• One popular legend has it that the ice cream sundae got its name because it was developed to get around "blue laws" prohibiting the selling of ice cream sodas on a Sunday. The rather simple solution was apparently to leave out the soda water but keep the ice cream and flavored syrup.
• In the United States, everyone who makes more than a certain income is required to pay income tax, and that includes corporations. Said corporations get around the rules by moving their profits to a different country that has a lower tax rate or even no tax rate at all. Because the money isn't being "made" in the U.S., the government can't enforce taxes on money that is not "there".
• When margarine was first introduced in the US, American butter companies feared it would ruin their business due to margarine being cheaper to make than butter. So the butter companies lobbied the government to restrict and hinder the sale of margarine with one of them being margarine could not be dyed in the color yellow and had to be sold in white or pink color, making it unappealing to the consumers. The margarine companies agreed not to dye their products yellow... but the law never said they could not sell margarine with packets of yellow dye where consumers can mix the two.
• Glider kits (essentially a truck minus its engine and transmission) were intended for salvaging and reusing parts from old or wrecked trucks. They are also exempt from emissions regulations and the federal excise tax. Rather obviously, this has led to companies using only gliders for their truck fleet to avoid paying taxes.
• The Yellowstone National Park is almost entirely in Wyoming, but extends a bit into Montana and Idaho. Yet it falls in its entirety under the District of Wyoming, even the bits in Montana and Idaho. Since three of the road entrances into the park, plus one of the visitor centers, lie within Montana, a small number of park employees do live within that state, but the Idaho section is totally uninhabited by humans. Since the US Constitution demands an "impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed", if ever someone is murdered in that uninhabited 50-square mile strip of Idaho, good luck in finding that jury. That's how — even though this loophole hasn't tested yet — that strip earned its nickname "The Death Zone".
• Upon being outed to her bigoted neighbors, a trans woman decided to take revenge by jogging topless. After all, according to them she's a man, and it's not illegal in Tennessee for a man to jog without his shirt on.
• Disability law has a surprising number of loopholes:
  • In general, the rule, for employers, is that an employee can't be fired for their disability, as it's discrimination, however, there's nothing in the clauses for firing a disabled employee for something else unrelated to the disability (As mentioned here). This is still commonly litigated, however, as pretextual terminations (using a defensible reason as the official reason for termination when the real reason is illegal) are absolutely grounds for a claim, and most people who suspect that they were really fired for protected reasons (or, less favorably, were actually fired for legitimate reasons, but think that they can shake down their former employer for a settlement) will give it a shot in court.
  • The terms "reasonable accommodation" can be subject to much interpretation, especially when it comes to work and housing. To get around this, some employers or housing managers simply mark that the employee or tenant can't be accommodated or that their condition doesn't require an accommodation.
  • As reported on many a pet forum, pet owners using the FHA to get around animal clauses in lease agreements, as, according to the Fair Housing Act, the animal has to be allowed under a "reasonable accommodation", in which case, one has to have paperwork that says their pet is a ESA (emotional support animal) to be allowed to have it. Similarly, people have been able to skirt "service animal" laws in some areas by simply getting a vest or saying that their animal is a service animal, as, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, no one can say or ask for credentials to prove otherwise. Unsurprisingly, both ideas are not looked upon favorably.
  • In 2018, a few airlines have banned "bully" breeds ^note Any dog under the "pit bull" moniker from flights, even if they're service animals. Ordinarily, under ADA, this would be cited as discrimination when it comes to businesses but airlines are under the FAA, which allows this.
  • Religious entities (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) are almost completely exempt from the ADA. On top of this, any place or program controlled by a religious entity is also exempt—including schools, day care centers, food banks, shelters and even hospitals. If a religious entity leases its space to a private business, or to a state or local government, the ADA does apply—but the burden of compliance falls on the tenant, not the religious entity. Employees of religious entities are excluded from ADA protections if they perform traditional ministerial duties (conducting ritual, worship, or instruction), but other employees are covered by ADA protections. That said, pretty much every church, synagogue, mosque, etc. of any significant size meets most if not all ADA accessibility requirements.
• Cigarette advertising was banned on American television in 1971.^note A ban on all tobacco products came about a decade later. E-cigarette ads have become common recently, since the ban doesn't specifically say anything about them (e-cigs were actually patented in 1963 but didn't start getting mass-produced until 2004). RJ Reynolds began test-marketing an e-cigarette brand in 2014 and ran TV ads for it. The situation of one of the companies targeted by the original ban running ads for a nicotine-based utensil seems to really be pushing the envelope.
• In several local communities in the US, bans have been enacted on the sale of sex toys - vibrators in particular. Adult retailers got around the bans by rebranding the products as "adult novelties" and "personal massagers." In fact, several big retailers use the "personal massager" dodge to sell such products.
• The state of Georgia found itself in the center of a strange controversy in the late 1940s over who their Governor would be in part because of a loophole, leading to what became known as the Three Governors Controversy
  • During the 1946 gubernatorial election, the campaign of former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge sought to return to the Governor's Mansion (having served two previous stints as Governor from 1933-37 and 1941-43)^note after his latter term, the gubernatorial term was expanded from 2 to 4 years but with the Governor being ineligible to seek a second consecutive term. The ban on running for consecutive terms was lifted in the 1970s. During the campaign, Talmadge - in declining health and facing only token opposition in the general election - arranged to have some write-in votes for his son, Herman, who was managing the elder Talmadge's campaign due to a state constitution provision that if the governor-elect died before taking office, the General Assembly would choose between the 2nd and 3rd place finishers. Sure enough, Eugene Talmadge died at the age of 62 one month before he was to take office.
  • However, the situation became murkier with three men claiming the Governor's Mansion in the aftermath: Herman Talmadge, who came in 2nd via the write-in scheme, outgoing Governor Ellis Arnall and Lieutenant Governor-elect Melvin Thompson. Thompson sought to have the election certified, in part due to this strengthening his claim that he should be recognized as the next Governor, but the Talmadge team succeeded in blocking the efforts, with Herman Talmadge being sworn in on January 15, 1947 (Arnall, meanwhile, refused to leave; though the following day the locks were changed to lock Arnall out).
  • Soon after Arnall threw his support to the Thompson camp, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the General Assembly had violated the state constitution in electing Herman Talmadge, resulting in Melvin Thompson becoming the next Governor which also setting up a special election to be held in November 1948. Herman Talmadge eventually defeated Thompson in the Democratic primary before being elected to finish the term his father had been elected to, ultimately winning a full term in his own right in 1950 and eventually serving four terms in the United States Senate from 1957 until 1981 (after his defeat in 1980).
• It's illegal to outright ban unions. So what do you do? Pass laws saying Unions cannot "force" you to join or that you do not have to be part of a union to receive benefits (Such as vacation, ample compensation for work, overtime pay, hazard pay, health insurance, vision coverage, dental plans, job security, breaks, etc). When workers receive such benefits, they feel less inclined to join a union... you can do the math from here.
  • Ain't No Rule saying you can't make workers compete against each other so that they hate each other so they won't unionize.
  • Management is technically not allowed to be part of a workers union. Sounds simple, right? Well, tech workers have put two and two together and decided to make a lot of management positions (Middle management) so that if they do unionize, the "managers" can be told they have to leave the union.
• Record companies used to be able to claim unsuccessful albums as tax writeoffs. In the latter part of The '70s, some resourceful music industry people came up with a scheme worthy of Max Bialystock himself: record labels that existed solely to produce flop albums. They would buy existing tapes of artists (sometimes just demos) and release them, or even just re-release old albums. They all had very cheaply produced artwork, with only a handful of copies printed. Then they'd flat-out lie in their accounting, claiming that they'd spent thousands of dollars producing the albums, and printed up thousands of copies. And to make this even more crazy, they never bothered to notify the artists of the releases (except for a few who were willing participants in the scam). Some of the albums were straight-up copyright violations, with material by well-known artists (like The Beatles and Sly and the Family Stone) issued under different names, and ripoffs of existing album artwork. At some point in The '80s the tax law loopholes were closed and the companies closed up shop, but the albums have become collectors' items, often selling for thousands of dollars. Many of the artists were stunned to learn that they'd had their music released decades earlier when collectors contacted them.
• A form of Loophole Abuse that's cropped up in recent decades involves a potentially dangerous cost-benefit analysis, where a company knowingly fails to correct a problem because they determine that the consequences to them of said problem are less costly than fixing the problem would be. In one particularly egregious example, auto manufacturer Ford became aware that their new car, the Pinto, had potentially lethal flaws, but determined that it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits with accident victims after the fact than to pre-emptively correct said flaws.
  • Monetary fines often run into this as well. If the amount of a fine is less than what it would cost to comply with the regulation in question, some corporations will choose to pay the fine as a "cost of doing business" rather than take the more expensive step of rectifying the problem. Because the fine is already seen as a penalty, there is as yet no additional law to punish this sort of evasion.
• In the early 80s Ronald Reagan passed a law increasing the tariff to a maximum of 49.4 percent on goods produced overseas. Among those affected were motorcycles, specifically the likes of those from Japanese firms such as Honda whom Harley-Davidson accused of eating through their sales (and indeed it was, especially when Honda was able to offer bikes far superior to what Harley could muster at the time especially during the AMF era where build quality was spotty). Harley lobbied the government into restraining the Japanese from competing against them in the heavyweight motorcycle segment, and naturally this didn't sit well with the Big Four, namely Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki. But since the tariff only specified imported bikes with engine capacities of over 700cc, this led to Japanese manufacturers releasing somewhat detuned versions of their heavyweight bikes to get around the tariff restrictions. One example of these so-called "tariff bikes" was the Honda VF700C Magna, a variant of the VF750C Magna with a slightly shorter stroke, and ironically enough, slightly more horsepower.
• The City of New York (and many other large cities) have zoning regulations on the maximum height of buildings, based on the ground footprint of the building and the lot size: Basically, the bigger the lot, the taller the building may be. This combines with other formulae for setbacks and percentage of the lot that may be covered by the building, with the overall object of allowing sufficient sunlight and fresh air to reach street level. The builders of 200 Amsterdam Ave. found a way around this by purchasing bits and pieces of adjacent lots, as well as "development rights" from nearby parking lots, increasing the 'lot size' used in the height calculation by almost ten times from the actual size. Although they had some legal troubles, they're in the clear as of 2021.
• In 1896, New York passed the Raines law, which prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sunday except for in hotels, which were required to serve it either with a meal or in a bedroom. Saloons started applying for hotel licenses, adding small furnished rooms to the building, and serving alcohol with inedible sandwiches that were passed from table to table whenever someone ordered. The proliferation of cheap 'Raines hotels' also facilitated an increase in prostitution and casual sex outside of marriage, much to the dismay of moral crusaders behind the law, which included the New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. There were further loopholes, such as allowing alcohol to be served in private clubs, leading to an explosion in the number of such clubs in New York City, along with local judges taking a very open-minded view as to the definition of 'club', 'hotel', 'meal', and 'guest'. Attempts to plug the loopholes with successive legislation were not entirely successful, until finally alcohol was banned altogether in 1919.
• Tic-Tacs are listed as sugar-free despite being almost pure sugar with almost nothing else in it. How do they manage to get away with that? Well US law happens to say you can list something as sugar-free if it has half of a gram of sugar in it or less per serving, and it just so happens they can conveniently make the serving size one tic-tac, which total size is less than half a gram.
• At least one prominent modern-era example exists of a member of Congress running in a special election for the seat vacated by the same person. In 1982; Texas Congressman Phil Gramm - one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress - had just been elected to a 3rd term in the House of Representatives; only for Gramm - best known for his conservative views, particularly on budgetary issues - to be thrown off the House Budget Committee in favor of a more liberal Democrat; after which Gramm resigned from Congress in protest, triggering a special election held in early 1983...upon which Gramm entered the race after switching parties to become a Republican. Gramm eventually won the special election and remained in the House for that final term before being elected to the Senate in 1984.
  • In a similar spirit, when Senator Joe Lieberman lost the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary to challenger Ned Lamont, he filed to run in the general election as the candidate of the newly-created "Lieberman for Connecticut" party (he'd actually begun gathering signatures for this a month before the primary, when the polls were starting to turn against him). Lieberman defeated Lamont in November by a 50% to 40% margin, largely because Republicans abandoned their own nominee (Alan Schlesinger, who ended up with 10%) to vote for Lieberman (two-thirds of Democrats went for Lamont). Lieberman served in the Senate as an independent, but still caucused with the Democrats.
• In July 2021, in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Texas Governor Greg Abbott set down a law forbidding school districts from setting down mask mandates in the name of "letting people choose reasonably". As Texas had become one of the major hot spots for COVID-19 Delta Variant, schools were left with two choices — follow Abbott's mandate and risk hospitalizing teachers and students at a time where ICU beds were deathly low or risk losing funding by going against the governor. Paris, Texas, ended up finding a loophole and modified their dress code to make masks mandatory. This way, their students and teachers could be protected and they weren't putting down mandates over masks.
• Texas's anti-abortion law, going into effect in September 2021, is one that easily evades any sort of law enforcement. The law bans anyone getting an abortion after six weeks after conception, a period when most people don't realize they are pregnant. However, instead of getting law enforcement involved in the process and risk easy slapdowns from the courts, the law instead allows the citizens to sue those getting an abortion and those who aid and abet them, effectively making them "abortion bounty hunters" and putting the law in a murky gray area that people are uncertain they want to get into.
  • However, its wording has opened up a new can of worms, as it allowed other states to pass similarly-worded laws on issues such as gay marriage and gun rights, essentially doing an end-run around the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
• The company that owns Madison Square Garden has a written tax exemption from the city of New York, but one of the conditions is that the two sports teams which it owns, the NBA's Knicks and NHL's Rangers, must play all of their home games held in the city at the Garden. This became an issue for the Rangers when the NHL was looking to hold outdoor games, since the Rangers can't host such a game without jeopardizing the arena's tax-exempt status. The solution was rather obvious: any outdoor game involving the Rangers would have them as the visiting team: first against the New Jersey Devils and New York Islanders at Yankee Stadium (in the Bronx) in 2014, and again against the Buffalo Sabres at Citi Field (in Flushing) in 2018. This workaround saves MSG from having to pay around $40 million in property taxes per year.^PostscriptThe MSG Company split into two separate entities in 2020, though the Dolan family still holds controlling interest in both. The Garden is now owned by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, while the sports teams are owned by Madison Square Garden Sports.
• The state of Tennessee's vagueness in when a newly-elected Governor is to be sworn in was taken advantage of in an interesting way in January 1979. Ray Blanton, the Democratic Governor who was leaving office after a single term^note Blanton was the first Governor eligible to run for a second term since Tennessee expanded its gubernatorial terms from 2 to 4 years; but chose not to for reasons explained elsewhere in this entry due to his involvement in a series of pardon and liquor license bribery scandals^note in 1977; Blanton fired Board of Pardons and Paroles chairwoman Marie Ragghianti after Ragghianti refused to release prisoners that were later revealed to have bribed state officials in exchange for the pardons. Ragghianti - represented by future U.S. Senator Fred Thompson - would sue and receive a $38,000 judgment; with the events featured in the 1985 movie Marie; with Sissy Spacek playing Ragghianti while Thompson would start his acting career by playing himself that resulted in Blanton's legal advisor T. Edward Sisk and two others going to jail following an FBI raid on the state capitol; with the event that led to this trope resulting from Blanton's January 15, 1979 signing of 52 pardons, including 20 for convicted murderers - among those was Roger Humphreys, convicted in 1973 of the murder of his ex-wife and a male friend who just happened to be the son of a Blanton supporter and upon which Blanton boasted "This takes guts." (Gentry Crowell, the Secretary of State from 1977 until he committed suicide following his own corruption scandal in 1989, sarcastically noted "Some people have more guts than brains."). After State Senate President and Lieutenant Governor^note in Tennessee, the president of the Tennessee State Senate also serves as Lieutenant Governor John Wilder and State House Speaker (and future Governor) Ned McWherter learned that Blanton was planning to sign more pardons, they noticed the vagueness of when the Governor-elect was to be sworn in and decided to have the Governor-elect; Republican candidate Lamar Alexander, sworn in three days before the traditional inauguration date, a process which Wilder called "impeachment, Tennessee style".
• The Georgia state constitution explicitly prohibits banishment from the state as a punishment for a crime, alongside whipping. However, banishment from specific counties has been interpreted as legal. In certain cases, offenders have been banished from 158 of Georgia's 159 counties, often leaving Echols County, a small, mostly swampy rural county on the Georgia-Florida border, as the offender's only legal option. Officials choose Echols because they believe no offender would actually move there due to the lack of legitimate job opportunities and leaving the state would be a more appealing option. Judges in South Georgia instead may exile an offender to a North Georgia county, such as Dade County in the northwest corner of the state.
• For film and television production crews, spent disposable rocket launchers are legally considered spent ammunition in most jurisdictions, which makes them easy to acquire in a way that even deactivated weapons and prop guns aren't. Part of the reason the M72 LAW is so disproportionately represented in media is because finding used examples of them is easy, and mocking them up to look loaded for your film is even more so.
• As a positive use of loophole abuse, in 2022, a California judge ruled that bees are to be classified as fish so as to receive protections under the state's endangered species act. How could that be? The act stated that it protects "native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile or plant." Since bees are an insect, and insects are not covered under this wording, the judge noted that the act's definition for a fish is “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian or part, spawn or ovum of any of those animals." Bees are invertebrates, invertebrates are defined as a type of fish, ergo, bees are a fish and therefore protected under the endangered species act.
• American law says that a legally binding contract cannot be legally binding forever. However, there's nothing stopping one party from making the length of contract valid for a very long time. Disney used this move against Florida when Florida wanted to strip Disney of its special taxation status. The contract said that any terms or rules that affected taxation on its land must be reviewed by Disney first, with the length of contract is written as "until twenty one years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III".
• The controversial "5-over-1" style of architecture (buildings with a brick or concrete ground floor with up to five stories of wood-framed floors above it) owes its prominence to this. In the United States, fire codes typically restrict the construction of completely wood-framed buildings, but buildings that are partially wood-framed and within a certain height limit are allowed. The code in Los Angeles allowed wood-framed structures to be up to 5 storeys in height, kicking off the "5-over-1" trend as the demand for mixed-use commercial and residential buildings soared.
• In Georgia, SNAP benefits can't be used to purchase hot food. So, many gas stations sell frozen food, and put out a microwave anyone can use.

Europe

Ancient Rome

• Ancient Roman law had quite a few of these, but an interesting one has to do with the place of Gaius Julius Caesar's assassination. You see, he was assassinated (for irony purposes) in the Theatre of Pompey at the feet of the statue of Pompey, his ally-turned-enemy whom he had fought in the civil war a few years earlier. The reason he went to the theatre in the first place was that there was a Senate meeting there that day. The Senate met at the theatre for a couple of reasons. First, it was roomier than the usual Senate house (or something like that). Second, and more importantly, the theatre was outside the pomerium, the legal boundary of the city of Rome. Many senators held imperium (military command) as proconsuls and propraetors (i.e. governors and deputy governors) and therefore could not enter the pomerium without forfeiting imperium. The Senate, however, was required to meet at places of religious significance, which of course an ordinary theatre was not. So how could they meet there? Simple: Loophole abuse. Many theatres were designated temples in order to get around moral laws to prevent the construction of theatres. Yes, we know. In fact, Pompey did just this—building the future assassination site just outside the pomerium, and building a temple to Venus (in her capacity as Venus Victrix, the goddess of victory) atop the seating section. In fact, Pompey may have had the pomerium-aversion in mind when he built the temple/theatre, as at the time the project was conceived, he was proconsul of Hispania, but living near Rome, and needed a place to attend Senate meetings without losing his governorship. (It turned out that by the time the temple/theatre was finished, he was serving as consul and could thus cross the pomerium without consequence.)
  • Another loophole: Weapons were strictly prohibited inside the pomerium except for members of the Praetorian Guard, an elite military unit responsible for protection of Roman dignitaries—and even they had to wear civilian dress while inside the boundary. However, since the assassination took place outside the pomerium, the conspirators couldn't be charged with sacrilege (very serious business in Rome) for carrying weapons inside the sacred city.
  • In other occasions, people were killed inside the pomerium through improvised weapons, including in at least one case a writing stilus. Since they weren't weapons but objects of common use, the perpetrators couldn't be charged with sacrilege.
• Ain't no rule that says a horse can't sit on the Roman Senate. Although it was technically more a case of the person in question reminding everyone Screw the Rules, I Make Them!.
• In Ancient Rome, in 162 BC, there was a grain shortage, so a new law was created that people were not allowed to fatten their chickens (meaning "hens") for slaughter with grain. Wily chicken farmers looked at this law, then promptly turned around and castrated their young roosters, fattening those instead. The law only prohibited the fattening of hens, after all. This loophole thus created the capon, one of the great delicacies of Classical Antiquity through the Early Modern West, and still prized among gourmets today.
• Rome didn't have a written constitution, only a set of unwritten norms and rules, often allowing for such tricks when a politician decided to break an inconvenient custom to advance his agenda until they were murdered by a rival. The ones who took advantage the most were the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who, with ten years separating their political careers, repeatedly broke customs and traditions to advance much needed agrarian reforms that went against the interests of the ruling class while using their roles as Tribunes of the Plebs and the accompanying sacrosanctitas (harming an incumbent Tribune of the Plebs was sacrilege and punished with a horrible death) to prevent murder attempts until they crossed one too many lines and discovered there were in fact ways to kill a Tribune of the Plebs and get away with it: while Gaius was killed well after his Tribunate had expired, Tiberius was lynched when the pontifex maximus, as the highest-ranked priest invoked the consecratio, a religious ritual killing of an enemy of the state, effectively removing his enemy's sacrosanctitas, allowing a mob to kill him with stones and broken chairs (they were, after all, inside the Pomerium, where carrying and using weapons was sacrilege).

Belgium

• Belgium is a constitutional monarchy: The king is the legal Head of State, but he has no say in what laws are passed. At the same time, however, a law is only effective after the king signs (or rubber-stamps) it. In 1990, when the Belgian parliament approved the liberalization of abortion in the country, King Baudoin I manifested that he didn't want to sign the bill because of his religious beliefs; instead, he asked the government to declare him "temporarily unable" to reign, in which case the Belgian constitution provides that the government acts as de facto head of state - and can, therefore, sign the bills itself. The law was passed, and the next day the government declared Baudoin capable again. This rigamarole attracted a great deal of derision in both Belgian society and abroad; when King Juan Carlos I of Spain was asked fifteen years later if he might pull something similar respecting the bill legalizing gay marriage in Spain, he simply replied, "Soy el Rey de España y no el de Bélgica." ("I am the King of Spain, not of Belgium.")

Czech Republic

• In the 17th Century when the country was still the Kingdom of Bohemia, the newly crowned and devoted Catholic King Ferdinand II, forced the Czech people to speak German in public and ban the use of the Czech language in any way including in plays and official business due to most of Czech being Protestants. But one area that didn't ban the use of the Czech language were puppet shows, thus the locals could get away from speaking their native tongue without repercussions and saving the language from extinction.

Denmark

• Denmark suffers majorly from this for its youth workers. It depends on the manager and the job, but because any person under 18 isn't a legitimate adult, you really have no way of saying so.
  • Another situation where Denmark suffers from this is School Internships. Regardless of age, when you take a "workforce-oriented education" you need an internship to complete said education. If you fail to find an internship, some schools can offer you a School Internship. Normally, everyone who's part of the Danish workforce has the right to 25 days off, 5 special days off and a specific salary. These rules also apply to apprentices doing internships at companies. However, if you're doing a School Internship, you're technically not working for a company but instead technically going to school, so the legally required days off don't apply and you only receive whatever a regular student would get every month, saving the schools a lot of money and getting cheap electricians/IT-supporters/cooks with ease. And most students aren't even informed of their terms as School Interns.
  • Sadly even in other countries and what not, high-ranked workers have a tendency to abuse "rookies" for jobs they can't be bothered with.

France

• French comedian Coluche ran for President in the 1981 election - he originally announced it for the lulz and ran a mock campaign but dropped out of the race shortly before the election. Partly because it was starting to look like he had a real shot at the win (which he never really wanted, he was just taking the piss all along), and partly due to pressure from more serious parties or rather, as he later recounted, due to Suspiciously Specific Denial of any pressure whatsoever: representatives from both major parties informed him he had absolutely nothing to worry about from their party; but that he should be wary of the other because those guys weren't above dirty tricks and it would be a right shame if something bad happened to him.
• If it's too difficult to loophole your way out of paying taxes, you can always move your millions to and declare fiscal residence in a different country with lower taxes, while your formerly first, now second but far bigger and more luxurious residence where you also happen to live most of the year is still in your country of birth. Case in point: All the French millionaires "fleeing" to Belgian villages right on the other side of the frontier. Immigration laws don't apply to money!
• When Hugh Capet was made King of the Franks/France, he soon discovered a problem: his descendants might have more than one son. Normally, this is seen as a good thing, especially for kings, but ancient Frankish law required partible inheritance: that is, when the father died, his land and other property was divided equally among his sons. This can be pretty annoying when your land is a large estate—within a few generations, there's nothing large about the estate—but his land was the Crown Lands of France. That is to say, the estate Capet wanted to keep intact was the lands the King controlled directly as king, rather than through his great lords, consisting of the Île-de-France: Paris and the area immediately surrounding it. There was no risk that his kingdom would be split by the 10th century: at that point, the position of "King of France" was indivisible, but it was a rather meaningless title. Rather like Holy Roman Emperor, the "King of France" was just a nominal and symbolic head of a country really ruled by squabbling nobles. Capet wanted to put an end to that and make the King the true, supreme authority from the Rhine to the Pyrenees.
  
  However, Capet's efforts couldn't get off the ground if his personal Crown Lands—the Île-de-France—kept being subdivided (as had happened to his predecessor Charlemagne's empire about 150 years earlier); although the Crown Lands were not the whole kingdom (which had been the problem with Charlemagne's empire), the Crown Lands did provide the king of the undivided kingdom with his sole source of income and feudal levies (i.e. soldiers, i.e. power) to fight off the avaricious nobles. If the King kept having to divide and subdivide the Crown Lands among his sons, the King of France would quickly become the biggest joke on the Continent. On the other hand, if he could keep the Crown Lands intact, the King would be able to keep his income and his soldiery from generation to generation, and be able to increase the size of the Crown Lands through marriage, conquest, and (if the income was good enough) straight-up purchase. If only there were some way he could get there...
  
  ...And there was. A Frankish custom just as old as partible inheritance allowed the King to appoint a junior co-King to manage affairs he couldn't/didn't care to handle. Capet appointed his son Robert to be co-king so that when Hugh died, the Crown Lands—being the property (as their name implied) of whoever held the crown—stayed intact. After all, only one king had died, and the other one was still alive! Robert did the same thing with his son Henry, who did the same with his son Philip, who did the same with his son Louis, who did it with his son Louis, who did the same with his son Philip...and at that point the rule of primogeniture was so firmly entrenched that they didn't need to engage in this custom. France wouldn't be fully centralized for centuries to come... but Hugh Capet must have been laughing with delight from beyond the grave.
  • There were attempts to implement these in the Visigothic Kingdom, but they didn't fly. See below.
• The French parliament banned Amazon.com from free shipping due to complaints from local stores. Amazon responded by charging one cent for shipping orders that met the free shipping requirement.
• This is why photos of the Eiffel Tower at night are technically copyright infringement. While the tower itself has been in the public domain since 1993, ain't no rule that says you can't install lights and call it art.^note The lights were installed in 1985 and are thus still protected by copyright. As a result, the French government considers the tower and the lights to be separate works of art, with the latter's copyright owned by the Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel.

Germany

• The Weimar Constitution, much of which was technically retained throughout the Nazi period, provided extensive protection for those who were formally accused of a crime and placed under arrest, but nothing for those who were merely in "protective custody". Most victims of Nazism were never accused of any crime or placed under arrest, but were merely placed in "protective custody".
• An ingenious German man got around the EU's ban on high wattage lightbulbs for a while by importing and selling them as "heaters". That particular loophole was intentional, to allow for heat-lamps for terrariums and such, but since 95-98% of the filament bulbs' actual output is in heat (which is why they're so energy inefficient), he could technically get away with it. The loophole was soon closed and, in any case, it seems clear that the man was attempting a form of protest rather than any money-making scheme.
• In a part of the Holy Roman Empire, peasants were legally obliged to pay their lord a certain percentage of their grain harvest. So when in the 18th century the potato became a new food staple in Germany, the crafty peasants decided to switch from wheat and rye to potatoes so they could keep the entire harvest and resulting profits themselves. The lord tried to get them to pay a portion of the potato harvest, but in vain; the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) in Wetzlar found that the peasants were in the right. The case is fairly well known in Germany, as one of the officials in charge of the case in Wetzlar was a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• Infamous "director" Uwe Boll routinely abused a former loophole in German tax law that rewards investments in film. The law allowed investors in German-owned films to write off 100% of their investment as a tax deduction; it also allowed them to invest borrowed money and write off any fees associated with the loan. The investor was then only required to pay taxes on the profits made by the movie; if the movie loses money, the investor would get a tax write-off.
  Uwe Boll: Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.
• Germany's patent laws are the worst: you have to go medieval on everyone potentially infringing on a patent you own because if you don't, said patent will become null and void.
• Those Wacky Nazis never technically abolished the Weimar Republic. Through his whole 12-year run, Adolf Hitler issued nothing but "emergency" decrees. This came to bite the Nazis in the arse after the war, because as the Nuremberg courts noted, not even those emergency decrees had ever legalized murder, thievery, and all those other things the Nazis enthusiastically engaged in so much.
• The infamous Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (MEFO) was primarily intended to get around the Treaty of Versailles' restrictions on rearmament. The treaty forbid the issuing of government bonds to fund weapon programs, but as an ostensibly private company MEFO was free to issue all of the grants and bonds it wanted, even though it was fairly transparent that MEFO was closely linked to Nazi Germany's economic and military policy. It is estimated that by 1939, MEFO's obligations made up about half of Germany's national debt.
• In Late Medieval Germany, there was a law, or at least a guild charter, that knife-makers couldn't make swords. But there weren't no law that a knife couldn't be the same size and shape as a sword: the specific definition in the charter depended mostly on the handle construction. This led to a class of weapons known as messer, which is German for "knife" (the terms langes messer [long knife] grosses messer [big knife] and kriegsmesser [war knife] are also used, nearly interchangeably). These messer were swords in every way that mattered, but had the handle construction of a knife, and the sword-makers guild had no leg to stand on.
  • Messer-type weapons were also intended to exploit another legal loophole. Many places had sumptuary laws forbidding non-nobles from carrying swords. So, what is a commoner who needs a self-defense arm to do? Get a big honking knife that handles like a sword and can be carried like a sword, but isn't a sword according to a strict interpretation of the term "sword", that's what.
• In Germany (and few other European countries) it is illegal to display any sort of Nazi symbols, so white supremacists living in those countries put up Confederate flags, as there are no bans against it.
  • Similarly Nazi Party symbols may be banned, but substituting in new symbols Neo-Nazis agree are racist is not. The most famous are the quenelle^note a gesture that usually means "fuck jews" and the "eight eight"^note which means Hail Hitler (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet). This phenomenon is why some people advocate that banning these kinds of symbols is pointless, since you will just limit people critical of Nazism, while Neo-Nazis will still find a way to be Neo-Nazis.
  • German neo-Nazis also parade often under symbols of the Second Reich (1871-1918), which are not banned.
• The German intercity bus company FlixBus, among the biggest in the world, operates by leasing all of its coaches to ensure operating flexibility. The sole problem with this is that German regulators require bus companies to own buses in order to classify as such. So FlixBus owns just one bus to check that box.

Greece

• In Greece, voting is supposedly compulsory and any eligible voter not voting is illegal. However, the law does not specify any punishment for not voting.
• Strip clubs in various Greek island resorts, (generally the ones where British schoolchildren go for their sixth-year holidays^note Like spring break, but messier, and more fucked up) ignore laws against prostitution by offering massages.

Hungary

• "King" Mary of Hungary. No Queen could rule Hungary according to law, but there was no law against a woman being King. This loophole would be used again by King Maria Theresa of Hungary a few centuries later. Note that the Hungarian language only has genderless pronouns, making it somewhat easier to carry it out.
• In the kingdom of Hungary, the crown itself (the physical object) had something which we would call today a "legal personality", owning the lands of the country, and the king was technically a regent for it.
• Hungarian copyright law cannot technically punish people downloading copyrighted stuff from the internet because of two loopholes in the local laws:
  • All data storage devices sold in stores have copyright royalties included in the price and thus these users have already paid for whatever copyrighted content they might store on them (similar legislation has been proposed in several other countries as well).
  • Making a copy for personal use isn't illegal by itself. There is, for some reason, no rule about needing to own the original first.
  • Bottom line: acquisition itself isn't illegal, only distribution. Restricting filesharing activity to downloading only makes anyone able to slip away with downloading terabytes of porn without repercussions as long as they don't give a single byte of it to anyone else^note Rules Lawyers can rightfully argue that the BitTorrent protocol is incapable of establishing a download-only connection - until the potential violator counter-argues that they don't necessarily have to use that specific protocol, a Loophole Abuse of its own. Is it any wonder Hollywood enforces a mandatory delay with movie premieres in the country?
  • A potential but still present loophole can also be spotted: local copyright enforcement agency Artisjus has complete monopoly on the distribution of collected royalties and no governmental control over their activities whatsoever. You can see where this is going: they alone decide how much royalty is collected and how much of it actually goes to the copyright holders.
• Hungary, in particular, has a history of this. Especially the late 19th century saw the national figureheads abusing every single loophole in the laws to avoid paying taxes or participating in politics as a protest against Austrian rule, a form of civil disobedience they dubbed "passive resistance".

Iceland

• In the wake of the utter collapse of the Icelandic economy, a group of comedians and entertainers led by Jón Gnarr (a comedian who used to hang out with Björk) formed the "Best Party" and ran half-seriously at best for Reykjavík City Council in 2010. To everyone's surprise—including their own—they won a plurality, and Gnarr became Mayor of Reykjavík.

Italy

• The post-war Italian constitution banned the death penalty for civil crimes from the moment it became valid, with the unofficial rule being that any such crime that received a death sentence in the meantime being quietly turned into a lengthy prison sentence. As such the authors of the Villarbasse massacre expected to get away with their crime in spite of the whole public opinion clamoring for their execution (to the point that the only one who escaped arrest and the death sentence did so because the Mafia got him first)... But there was no rule stating that the president of Italy had to turn all death sentences into prison terms, and he refused.

Netherlands

• The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. However, all the official laws always refer to the monarch as "the King" with a separate law stating that in the case of a queen regnant (i.e. the actual reigning monarch being female) these laws apply to "the Queen". This isn't a problem when the monarch is male, but if the monarch is female her husband would technically outrank her as he would be "the King". As a result, the husbands of Dutch queens regnant^note Of whom there has been a lot lately: between the death of William III in 1890 and the accession of the current King Willem-Alexander in 2013, every single Dutch monarch was a woman — and since the Netherlands has absolute primogeniture and Willem-Alexander has (as of 2023) only daughters, it is almost certain that the next monarch will also be a woman, as well. are officially known as "Prince of the Netherlands" to avoid this particular legal issue.
• All two-wheeled motor-driven vehicles that go up to 40km/h are legally considered mopeds under Dutch traffic law specifically to avoid Ain't No Rule. Segways, for example, are considered a type of moped by law, and thus people interested in owning and driving one are required to be over the age of 16 and have a driver's licence for it^note ...unless they can prove they're disabled, in which case it's legally classified as a mobility device.
• In January 2019, an Armenian family was about to be evicted out of the Netherlands due to having been denied asylum. To avoid this, their friends and relatives hid them in a church and held a neverending service, as the law bans the government from entering a cult place during worship. The service went on for three months until the government gave up.

Norway

• The Isdal woman case, which was filled with so many intentional dead ends (appearing to be set up by the Isdal woman herself), the police declared it a suicide (even though everything about the crime screamed murder) so the police would not have to investigate such an impossible case anymore.
• After World War II, the Norwegians had to figure out how to deal with their Nazi-collaborating puppet leader Vidkun Quisling. They would have very much liked to put a bullet in his brain, but there was just one problem - the death penalty was illegal in Norway, and the Norwegians wanted to keep it that way. So they simply legalized the death penalty, executed Quisling, and then re-banned it once Quisling was dead and buried.

Poland

• When a minor Succession Crisis occurred in Poland in 1384, the Polish nobles decided that Jadwiga, the younger sister of the Hungarian King Mary, should become the ruler of Poland. One problem: Polish law made no provision for a ruling queen (queen regnant); all previous female Polish leaders (including Jadwiga and Mary's mother Elisabeth) had been The Woman Behind The Man. On the other hand, they found (to their surprise, no doubt) that there was nothing that said the King of Poland had to be a man. Ergo, Jadwiga was crowned King of Poland. She even became a saint; she is known in English and German as St. Hedwig, patron of a United Europe.
• During communist rule of Poland, the Soviet backed government predictably declared only a few state owned record labels could make vinyl disks. However, it said nothing about "audio greeting cards." In theory produced as a novelty, cards of laminated cardboard and later solid plastic would be molded with a a couple tracks useable on a record player. "Craftsmen" (read: independent ventures) and public entities that weren't record stuidios could thus get around the monopoly. The idea of actually using the plastic ones as postcard seemed ludicrous, as it was almost impossible to write on them, but they still had a place for a stamp until the end.

Portugal

• Portuguese law on pyramid schemes criminalizes schemes where products are sold, but not where there's only money being moved around. Multi-Level Marketing is still (apparently) legal, though.
• In 1910, Portugal had a revolution: the monarchy was abolished and a republic was declared under a provisional government. The next year, elections to a Constituent Assembly, i.e. to draw up a new constitution, were called. Only "heads of household"^note legally defined as people who were able to financially support themselves and their families and weren't dependent on other people - thus including, besides the typical husband breadwinner/woman housemaker setup, e.g. widows/widowers, women whose husbands couldn't work, single parents and people who lived alone above 21 years old who could read and write and/or had income/paid income tax above the value established by law - thus, presumably male - were allowed to vote. However, due to a twitch in the Portuguese Language, which uses the male gender for situations where there are only men or where there are both men and women, Carolina Beatriz Ângelo^note a widowed gynaecologist qualified as a "head of household" and thus as a voter, hence becoming the first woman to vote in Portugal and indeed Southern Europe.

Romania

• Romanian law allows for the reduction of a prisoner's sentence for each book written or academic degree earned while in prison. Unsurprisingly, there have been crime bosses, and influential politicians imprisoned for charges of corruption, who "wrote" dozens of books and "earned" several academic degrees in just a few months.

Russia

• Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a third presidential term after a four-year gap when he served as Prime Minister. The Russian Constitution used to impose a limit on consecutive terms (no more than two) but says nothing about a limit on lifetime terms. After the 2020 constitutional amendment, which nullified term limits, Putin is now free from term restrictions, allowing him to remain in office as President until 2036.
• When Tsar Feodor III decreed in 1679 that all field slaves should be made serfs, he effectively abolished slavery in most of his empire (Peter the Great would complete the process by making all house slaves into serfs in 1723). Feodor didn't do this out of humanitarian concerns; in fact, Russian serfdom was almost every bit as bad as slavery, and serfs could be bought and sold the same. The key difference was that serfs paid taxes, while slaves did not. In order to lose that burden, many serfs had agreed to become slaves to their lords.
• There is legislation regarding the Russian National Anthem, such as how and when it is to be played, what the official music and lyrics are, and a requirement for people to stand at attention. There is also a requirement that the anthem is to be played respectfully and without causing offense. However, the legislation doesn't define what 'offensive behavior' might be, or specify any penalties for violating it. Also, since state signs and symbols are not subject to Russian copyright law, they can be freely modified and even parodied without legal penalty, although you might still get in other forms of trouble.
• Russia has a law forbidding "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations", and gay rights activists have been convicted under this law. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, hosted by Russia, an international group of activists traveled to Moscow wearing their countries' respective team jerseys. Individually, they blended in as soccer fans, but when they all stood side by side in the right order, it effectively turned them into one human gay pride flag.
• Russia doesn't recognize same-sex marriages, but neither does it recognize transgenderism. This means that if one of the partners is transgender, only gay marriage is allowed, which some couples have taken advantage of.

Spain

• Of 35 Visigothic kings between 395 and 720 AD, 11 were murdered by their successors. The Visigoths had an Elective Monarchy and Gothic law said that a new king should be elected immediately in the same place where the previous one had died. But what man is closer to the place where a king dies than the man stabbing the king in the back?
• In Spain, it is illegal to publish election polls on the 5 days preceding a general election, but it is not illegal to make them. In the time leading to the 2015 Spanish general elections, the Andorran newspaper El Periòdic d'Andorra published a new poll every day with data collected by its owner, the Spanish newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya. And because Twitter and Facebook are considered publications, even though it's unlikely any action would be taken, Spaniards humorously shared the polls during those five days while claiming that they were prices in Andorran supermarkets. Water stood for ruling party PP (whose color is blue), strawberries for PSOE (bright red), eggplants for Podemos (purple), oranges for Ciudadanos (orange) and tomatoes for IU-UP (green and darker red).

Sweden

• In 18th century Sweden, one complicated legal manoeuvring and trickery led to the Riksdag being firmly superior to the monarch, who also had a stamp made with his signature to save on time when mass-signing laws. The monarch later tried to gain leverage to regain some authority by refusing to sign laws — at which point the Riksdag took hold of the stamp, argued that the use and acceptance of it meant that the signature made by it was legally the same thing as the king writing a signature, made a declaration to that effect, and used the stamp to sign laws themselves. In other words, the loophole was that for certain legal purposes the (role of the) king was a literal stamp.
• A more recent one comes from the late 90s and involves regulations concerning TV commercials. According to the laws of the time, advertising-financed broadcast media was legal, but it was not permitted to interrupt programs for the sole purpose of running ads. The solution? Lots of small, completely useless "shows" were created. The most egregious example being "About a book", a two minute segment of a D-list celebrity talking about a book ("Big Brother"-Nicko reviews "The Destroyer" or something of similar weight) which was of no interest to anyone, but could be bookended by ad-blocs completely legally. Similarly, news and weather forecasts were split into separate "shows", also allowing an extra ad-bloc. In the end, the legislators sighed and gave up, especially in light of that cable and satellite TV channels broadcasting from other countries were not so restricted.

Türkiye

• The Turkish electoral system features a relatively steep 7% electoral threshold, but allows independent candidates to ignore it. Just about every small party simply runs their candidates as independents to dodge the threshold.

Ukraine

• Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi has a Ukrainian, Cypriot and Israeli citizenship, even though the constitution of Ukraine forbids dual citizenship. He explains it that even though the constitution forbids double citizenship, it doesn't say anything about triple citizenship.

United Kingdom

• Averted with the Scottish legal system, which has the doctrine of nobile officium that allows the Judges of the Court of Session or High Court of Justiciary to provide extra-legal remedies provided they are in line with common sense and mercy. It is incredibly rarely used, but the threat of it is enough to stymie egregious loophole abuses.
• Under British law, an MP cannot be impeached or resign from the House of Commons; once elected, you must serve your full five-year term. This rule dates back to the early days when being an MP was not as easy as it is today, especially if you represented a rural constituency far from London: you were unable to handle whatever business you made your living in, and the constant travel to and from Westminster could only be done via poorly-maintained roads. And before 1911, Members didn't even receive a salary. It also wasn't unusual to have involuntarily elected MPs, who'd be further incentivized to quit. As a result, the House passed a rule that you could not resign at all from your seat. However, as part of the Act of Settlement of 1701, a rule was passed saying that if an MP gets appointed to an "office of profit under the Crown" (as in, a paid government job in the executive or judicial branches), the constituency from which the MP was elected must hold a by-election, theoretically to give the people an opportunity to ensure that the MP is not being corrupted by the King's money. This was passed because the English Civil War had made Parliament wary of royal influence on the Commons, and wanted to keep the king from controlling MPs by giving them jobs, since if an MP's income depends in part on the king, he might be trusted to vote the King's way. The prohibition was strengthened over the following decades to bar MPs from simultaneously holding certain offices. However, MPs were able to hold crown stewardships until 1740, when Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn became Steward of the Lordship and Manor of Bromfield and Yale and was deemed to have vacated his Commons seat. With this precedent, it became possible for MPs to step down by being appointed to a crown stewardship.
  • Significantly, the MP has the option not to stand in this by-election. Thus in cases where an MP either wishes to leave Parliament or is convicted of a crime, publicly disgraced, or in some other way proves unfit, they are appointed to the job of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, or Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, sinecure positions which have no actual duties and are responsible for areas that no longer legally exist. They do, however, come with pittance salaries (usually a few pounds), thereby qualifying as "offices of profit of the Crown", triggering the by-election. The MP then can quietly decline to stand in the by-election, resign from the non-job, and move on with his/her life. This has become so common that someone taking these offices is simply said to have resigned from Parliament in daily speech and the press.
  • The current procedures were first used by John Pitt, who wanted to vacate his seat for Wareham in order to stand for Dorchester, as he could not be a candidate while he was still an MP. Moreover, it quickly became apparent that if ministers of the Crown were to be meaningfully responsible to Parliament, they needed to be able to sit in the House of Commons. For this reason, someone appointed to an office of profit was only disqualified from continuing to sit in the House of Commons; it was possible for someone already in office to be (re-)elected to Parliament without relinquishing the office. Pitt wrote to Prime Minister Henry Pelham in May 1750, reporting he had been invited to stand in Dorchester, and asking for "a new mark of his Majesty's favour [to] enable me to do him these further services". Pelham wrote to William Pitt the elder indicating that he would intervene with King George II to help. On 17 January 1751, Pitt was appointed to the office of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, and was then elected unopposed for Dorchester.
  • Most of these has been codified in the House of Commons Disqualification Act, where Section 2 provided at most 95 MPs can keep their seats while holding a ministerial position, and Section 4 specifically stated "the office of steward or bailiff of Her Majesty’s three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham, or of the Manor of Northstead" are disqualifiable offices, but MPs "disqualified" this way may still enter elections while holding such positions.
  • Until the early 20th century, Sections 24 and 25 of the Succession to the Crown Act 1707 listed ministerial offices as offices of profit, meaning any MP appointed to the Cabinet—even the Prime Minister—had to win a ministerial by-election in his own constituency in order to hold the seat and the office. At first this wasn't a problem, since most Cabinet members were Lords anyway, but as the number of members of the Commons in the Government rose, an exemption was made for certain situations. Therefore, the Re-election of Ministers Act 1919 was written to make it unnecessary to be re-elected within nine months of a general election, and the Act was amended in 1926 to abolish ministerial by-elections if the office the MP is appointed to is one of certain high offices, i.e. the ones in the Government.
• British elections have a spending limit on how much money a single party can throw at an individual constituency election. In years past, election spending started to be tracked once a party had declared their candidate, which led to the creation of the "Prospective Parliamentary Candidate": A candidate who will formally be selected as soon as an election is called, but in the meantime is free to campaign around their constituency and build up their image without worrying about the spending limit.
• While in Britain the law is adamant that a motor-bicycle and side-car set is still a motor-bicycle, not a motor-tricycle or a motor-car, they're not too picky as to what defines a motor-car, which leads on to: There ain't no rule saying you can't take your 'B' Licence practical test with a motor-bicycle. The four criteria for allowing a vehicle to be a test candidate's choice for a 'B' licence test (the one a car driver has to pass):
  • A: Vehicle must be capable of at least 100km/h.
  • B: The seat the examiner is to sit in must have an adjustable headrest.
  • C: The seat the examiner is to sit in must have a working safety-belt.
  • D: A suitable area must be made available on the vehicle so the examiner can place their own rear-view mirror.
  • Attaching a side-car to a motorcycle makes it possible to satisfy the last three criteria. If the candidate passes, they are allowed to drive a car without having to have seen the inside of one!
  • In a similar vein, for a short while, there was a rule limiting the size of motorcycle you could learn on but no corresponding limit for combinations. This led to firms making what was essentially a wheel on a spring that in legal terms was a sidecar so that people could ride stupidly powerful bikes on a provisional license.
  • The main reason why three-wheeled cars ever came into commercial production in Europe was that in some countries, they weren't legally classified as "cars", meaning you could drive one with only a moped license.
• A ballot paper for an election in the UK was found during vote counting with nothing but "fuck you tory bastards" written on it. However, as this was written in the conservative (Tory) box, the Tory candidate attempted to argue that it was a vote for him.
• Britain banned handguns for private ownership but it merely specified that a handgun is a gun below a certain length. Cue companies simply offering not-handguns with really long barrels and pistol braces.
  • Britain notably banned many of the indigenous people in its colonies from owning any kind of firearm. This can be a bit of a drag when you have all sorts of nasty predators running around your village. The solution was to just start making ridiculously powerful air rifles.
• When the term was first coined in the UK, a "civil liberty" was simply something that you were not prohibited from doing. This leads to an old Russian joke: Someone called Armenian Radio and asked, "What is permitted and what is prohibited?" Armenian Radio replied: "In Britain, what is permitted is permitted, and what is prohibited is prohibited. In America, everything is permitted, except for that which is prohibited. In France, everything is permitted, including that which is prohibited. In Germany, everything is prohibited, except for that which is permitted. And in the Soviet Union, everything is prohibited, including that which is permitted."
• In the United Kingdom, there used to be rotten boroughs that had representatives (two per borough) in Parliament even though they had a very small population - the district lines hadn't been changed in centuries, and what were once large population centers were now tiny villages. In some cases, even "tiny village" would be giving the rotten borough too much credit, such as the infamous Old Sarum with a population of just 7 people.^note Old Sarum's story is interesting in itself. It had representation as the site of a medieval bishopric, which moved in the 13th century when construction began on a new cathedral. New Sarum (which still exists today as the modern city of Salisbury) grew up around the cathedral (which also still exists) and eventually absorbed the population of Old Sarum, which was left almost abandoned. So pre-1832, New Sarum had thousands of inhabitants but was only represented as part of the county of Wiltshire, whereas Old Sarum had two MPs for a population of 7. Frequently, a member of the House of Lords would control a rotten borough and designate sons or friends as the borough's representatives in the House of Commons, thus allowing a Lord to effectively have votes in both Houses, in direct contradiction of the very purpose of the House of Commons. It was very difficult to get rid of them because it required an act of Parliament to redraw the district lines. This is why the U.S. Constitution requires that a census be taken every ten years.
• By law, for an MP to sit in the British House of Commons they must swear a specifically worded oath of allegiance to the reigning British monarch. There is, however, no law that says a Republican MP taking the oath can't add on their own extra words at the beginning or end which would effectively negate the oath.
  • Labour MP Dennis Skinner is particularly well known for doing this. For years after swearing "I... do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth", he would add "when she pays income tax" - the Queen did not pay income tax until the 1990s.
    • In more recent years he has added "and all who sail on her" implying that he was swearing allegiance to the ship Queen Elizabeth and not the British monarch.
  • Tony Benn added "As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law, under the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866, to allow me to represent my constituency… " at the beginning.
• British solicitor Nick Freeman has made it a specialty to get his celebrity clients Off on a Technicality. In response, the British press has nicknamed him 'Mr. Loophole'. Freeman's response? He had the name trademarked. Most of his cases were won on the basis of spelling errors or late submissions of prosecution papers, but among the other cases:
  • Arguing that a man who was using his mobile phone while driving was innocent, because the law stated that it was illegal to "text or make a call" while driving: since his phone had a voice memo dictation facility, he could have been using that perfectly legally, and they couldn't prove what he was using the phone for.
  • A man arrested driving with nine double vodkas in his system was examined by police surgeons due to the massive consumption of alcohol involved. Their report showed that they hadn't found it had done him any harm. Since it didn't mention just "being drunk", Freeman argued the examination had found he was sober.
  • A man pulled over for speeding on the motorway was asked to give his name. Freeman argued that as a result they could not prove the man in court wasn't someone else with the same name.
• In 1285 under the reign of Edward I, a law was passed which resulted in the execution of a violator. His crime… was burning coal, which was banned due to concerns about air pollution. That's right, medieval London knew about air pollution, but there wasn’t a rule against wood-burning. (Of course, if you couldn't burn coal or wood in those days, you couldn't burn much else, and you needed to keep the fire going somehow.)
• The Bill of Middlesex procedure allowed the Court of King's Bench to take cases that it didn't otherwise have jurisdiction for. The King's Bench had limited powers of arrest, but it could make arrests on the charge of trespass in the county of Middlesex. So the plaintiff would claim the defendant had committed a trespass in Middlesex, allowing the defendant to be arrested; once they were in custody, the actual charges would be brought forward and the trespass claim would be quietly dropped.
• In the period from 1629 to 1640, King Charles I of England attempted what is now known as his "personal rule" - governing without calling Parliament. However, as only Parliament could grant him the right to collect most conventional taxes, Charles turned to various somewhat unconventional methods of raising revenue:
  • He fined people who were "encroaching on royal forests". Past monarchs had done this, but the point of it was supposed to be to deter people from living near the forests. Charles, by contrast, wanted to encourage people to live near the forests so he could collect more fines. It is also important to note that a 'royal forest' didn't just mean literal forests, but rather pretty much any green common space owned by the Crown, which at one point was close to one-third of all land in Southern England. Charles I also often defined his royal forests based on outdated but never obsoleted documentation, ensuring he could fine people on land that he no longer owned.
  • He started enforcing a law saying that men of a certain wealth who didn't present themselves to the king to be knighted could be fined. This law hadn't been enforced in over 300 years. Even when it had, as with the forests the point was not to raise revenue through the fines but to encourage rich men to present themselves before the king. Charles had no interest in making more knights, he simply wanted to collect the fines.
  • The most notorious of all was "ship money". Officially, this was supposed to fund the construction of ships in a short amount of time when they were needed and the king didn't have the cash on hand to fund construction. As such, it was considered an emergency one-time measure to be paid only by coastal counties. Charles, however, demanded that it be paid by all counties year after year, noting that there was no explicit prohibition on him doing so and that what constituted an "emergency" as defined by the king.
• In the UK, there was a huge controversy over "Super Injunctions" — injunctions that forbid even mentioning the fact that such an injunction exists. Which, it was argued, certain very rich individuals were abusing to suppress free speech and/or silence less well off parties in disputes. Theoretically, anyone could overturn one by breaking it (once the information is out, it no longer applies), but would be guilty of being in contempt of court. However, in parliament, MPs have what's known as "parliamentary privilege", which protects them from the legal repercussions of anything they say as long as it's relevant to whatever parliament is debating at the time. So, when Trafigura tried to use one to stop The Guardian from reporting on alleged illegal waste dumping Paul Farrelly MP brought it up during Prime Minister's Questions, overturning the injunction.
• In the early 19th century, the British government placed taxes on timber imports. Willy timber merchants in Canada realized that this affected only timber transported aboard ships, but there was no rule on selling the timber that the ship itself was made of! Thus they invented the "disposable ship" - some of the longest wooden ships ever built (c. 100 m / 350 ft), which were barely seaworthy as they were little more than a lot of long timbers lashed together. These ships would sail to Britain only once, with little or no official cargo, and disassemble completely at the destination port to sell their parts tax-free.
• As a protest against Margaret Thatcher's crackdown on raves, the IDM band Autechre released an EP entitled "Anti EP" to benefit the National Council for Civil Liberties. One of the songs on the EP, "Flutter", was intentionally designed to loop around the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act's prohibitions on gatherings where "a succession of repetitive beats" is being played: the band stated that they "made as many different bars as we could on the drum machine, then strung them all together."
• A cyclist ran down and killed a pedestrian while riding a bike with no brakes that was only intended (and legal) for use in track racing, not on the streets. As the dangerous driving laws only apply to motor vehicles, but clearly some punishment was needed in this case, an old but never repealed law was dug up with a penalty for "wanton and furious driving", which was originally meant for horse-drawn carriages, and he was convicted and jailed for 18 months.
• English taxation laws in the 1700s included things like a tax on all the bricks used to build houses. The solution? Huge bricks!
  • There was also a tax on house size around the same time (as a way to tax rich owners of large houses more), which was measured off the number of windows in the house. Some people decided it was easier to brick up a certain number of windows than move.
• The law on postcodes (ZIP codes in the U.S.) sets 100 properties as the maximum limit for a street to have postcodes, and Royal Mail follows this to the letter of the law. However, the 100 properties rule only applies to a single street, therefore meaning in theory WD18 8FQ (the Royal Mail delivery office in Watford) could have well over the 100 property limit, if it were applied to different streets; same for any British street. Yet this loophole has rarely been used, but CV4 7AL (part of a university in Coventry) has over 5,000 people working/residing there. In general, the 100 properties is a maximum limit for one street, but it can go way beyond that.
• In England and Wales, there is no such thing as a legal name for a person, so effectively a company could create a Legacy Character role based on:
  Any one may take on himself whatever surname or as many surnames as he pleases, without statutory licence
  • Effectively this means, no deed poll is required and it's just a formality to do so.
• Ofcom regulates radio and television in the United Kingdom. While a regulation states that 3 hours of shows have to be presented locally, it doesn't mean that the presenter has to be there in the studio.
  • Exploited in that a presenter can actually do a show from any of the UK nations, and have it played out via the studio locally. So, in theory, someone could present a show for a Glasgow radio station, presented from a studio or at home in London, and it'd be broadcast via Glasgow, and officially, it's within the rules.
• An infamous loophole abuse occurred in Northern Island with the passing of a law which awarded farmers subsidies for converting their heaters to renewable energy. The subsidy covered both the heater and fuel for a period, plus an incentive payment to the farmer. But it didn't specify how the heaters had to be used. As a result, it was actually profitable for farmers to install heaters to heat empty, unused barns simply to increase their incentive payments.
  • .. and this was followed up by a secondary loophole abuse within the Northern Ireland Assembly. As part of the peace process, the NI assembly has a rule that allows any party to pass a "petition of concern" concerning any issue. If an petition of concern is passed about an issue, then a majority of representatives of both Unionist and Republican communities (across all parties) must support it. A substantial majority of parties in the Assembly requested that the minister who passed the heat subsidy law should be removed from office. Her own party did not have a comparable majority, but it did have a majority of Unionist votes; so it passed a petition of concern on the removal, making it impossible to enact as it could not gain a majority of Unionist votes. The reaction to this was furious and resulted ultimately in the NI Assembly temporarily collapsing altogether.

The Vatican

• There is no qualification necessary to be elected Pope except being a baptized Catholic male. The Papal Conclave would never elect anyone other than a Cardinal, but there's nothing stopping them from electing some random Catholic man as the Pope. He would have to be ordained bishop immediately if he hasn't been already, however.
  • Leo X (Pope 1513-1521) was a deacon, not an ordained priest. He was also made cardinal in 1489, at age 13, although he was not allowed to deliberate with the other cardinals until he was 16. Well, that's a relief, huh?
  • Celestine V (Pope July 5, 1294-December 13 1294) was an ascetic hermit named Pietro de Morrone who sent a warning to the Cardinals who had been arguing about electing a new pope for over TWO YEARS (they were evenly split between the candidates from two powerful Italian families). One Cardinal then nominated Pietro and, fed up with fighting, the others agreed. When some Cardinals brought Pietro the news of his election, he tried to run away. He ended up being well-loved by the people and hated by the establishment because he was unprepared for being Pope. He resigned the papacy under a law he declared himself. He also reinstituted the papal conclave, where the elector Cardinals are locked in a room until they elect the new Pope.^note The Conclave had been first instituted in 1274 by Gregory X, whose election, marred by political interference and nationalism of the cardinals themselves, had taken 33 months before the fury of the people of Viterbo (where the election was being held) made them settle on a candidate, and copied most of the measures taken by the locals after the fifteenth month: locked up and isolated from the outside since the start, and progressive reduction of their food as day passed (he did not take away the roof, however), plus Gregory's own addition of a confiscation of whatever income they got during the election. Due political interference in its enforcement in the second 1276 election, the newly elected Adrian V suspended it with plans to reform it but died before he could do so, and later that year his successor John XXI revoked it outright due to the outright hate most cardinals had for it. Then 16 years later the election of Nicholas IV's successor took two years, and Celestine V, also a collaborator of Gregory X, reinstituted it, with his successor Boniface VIII making it permanent.

Oceania

Australia

• Adam Hills, an Australian comedian, has an artificial foot. He can drive, but his license stipulates that he "must wear [his] artificial right foot" while doing so. As Adam points out: "...doesn't say where."
• In Australia, you can't own more than two radio stations in a given market. The Australian Radio Network, however, owns three stations in Sydney: one licensed to Sydney itself, one in Western Sydney, and one in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, whose signal happens to cover most of the metro area as well.

Asia

China

• In Hong Kong, a group of farmers, displeased that their private land is turned into a nature reserve, decided to cut down the mangrove trees in the area out of spite; turns out that while construction is banned without approval, simply destroying the ecosystem without any plan to actually do anything on it does not violate the law. An Obvious Rule Patch has been suggested, just don't expect it any time soon.
• In China, there's a long, sad idea known as "Hit-to-Kill". The idea of this is that if a person hits a pedestrian with a vehicle, they will intentionally run them over until they're dead, then claim they didn't know that they hit the person, mistaking them for an inanimate object. The idea behind this is due to the fact that the surviving victim is usually paid for their pain and suffering continuously, which can be very expensive for the guilty party; however, if the guilty party kills the victim, they only have to pay a one-time fee to the victim's family and a jail sentence, thus they see it as the Lesser of Two Evils to escape a lifetime of financial burden. However, this is slowly — slowly — becoming a Dead Horse Trope with the advent of CCTV, but there are still many people who accept the reasoning despite the evidence.
• The one-child policy (first replaced with a two-child policy in 2016, then briefly replaced by a three-child policy in 2021 before being completely scrapped that same year) did not punish multiple births. This resulted in many women, especially in the urban upper class and conservative rural areas, seeking fertility treatment with the express intention of having twins, causing the number of twins born in China to double.
• In 2016, the Chinese government issued a decree that intended, among other things, to ban Loot Boxes. The text they use is "[i]f an online game operator provides virtual items and/or value-added services by means of a random draw, the operator may not require the user to participate by the direct consumption of legal tender or virtual currency". Overwatch complied the law by restructuring the transactions involved such that these loot boxes become a "gift" when the user buys virtual currency, while later games, in order to stem in-game inflation, made loot boxes a "gift" for some other item that's not particularly useful.
• Some Chinese pornographers get around China's porn ban by making breathplay porn, which doesn't appear to be considered pornography by Chinese censors.
• Selling products by internet livestream is a big business in China, and became even bigger with the lengthy lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, livestream (or even still-photo) depictions of women in lingerie is also often considered illegal pornography. Some retailers use women wearing the items over t-shirts, while others use feminine-looking men, because apparently cross-dressing is less objectionable to the censors.
• Mobility Assistance Vehicles—China's equivalent to the US's Neighborhood Electric Vehicles—have always been in a regulatory grey area in China; some think it's just motor scooters, which means they're not subject to most traffic regulations, and users do not need a driver's license. In 2003, many places starts to close this loophole (a heavily-exploited one, as most MAV users aren't elderly) by recategorizing them to be on par with other electric vehicles. And then they found a substitute—electric wheelchairs. Since there's no way to require a driver's license to operate a motorized wheelchair, they probably don't have to worry too much for the time being.

Iran

• One pre-Islamic tradition that is still found under Shi'a beliefs is Nikah mut‘ah, (or Sigheh in Iran), a contractual agreement where the two parties agree to a marriage for a set period of time, with a dower traditionally given to the wife. This form of marriage was developed to allow Intrepid Merchants in the old days of commerce (back when a trade journey could take years on end) to marry a woman in the foreign land he was staying in semi-long-term (a few months to a few years) without having to worry about the somewhat messy divorce when he inevitably returned home.^note Contrary to popular belief, Islamic divorce is not as simple as saying "I divorce you" three times—even when that's the formal act dissolving the marriage (which it can be in some but not all schools of jurisprudence), the marital estate must still be partitioned fairly, and that takes time and effort. Today, this temporary marriage is being exploited in Iran to get around the ban on prostitution because there's no formal religious or legal definition of the minimum time the contract can run, thus it isn't a prostitute getting paid by her customer for sex, it's a wife receiving a dower from her husband before their one-night marriage ends in divorce.
  • Note that women are required to abstain from marriage (and any intercourse at all) for a period of time after the temporary one ends, which does prevent the woman from turning around and accepting a second temporary marriage immediately after the first one ends if she did have sex (which is always the case when this loophole is used that way).

Israel

• Israel once offered rewards to "Heroine Mothers," women who gave birth to 10 or more children. There was no rule, however, that said the mothers had to be Jewish. The practice was stopped after Arab women kept winning, threatening Israel's status as a Jewish state.
• In Israel, while prostitution is legal, organized prostitution (such as brothels and pimping) isn't. So instead, businesses advertise themselves as "massage parlors", usually stating explicitly that they do not offer sex. However, the "masseuses" are still free to offer the client any "extras". This is common wherever such rules are on the books.
• Israel has been in a State of Emergency since 1948, which is re-extended by the Knesset every year. Israel has not been on emergency for a grand total of one week during its existence: May 14 to May 21 of that year.
• Israel's nukes operate on a form of Loophole Abuse as well. The country has never officially admitted to having a nuclear program, even though pretty much everyone knows it exists. This is because, if it did officially reveal its program, it would give regional adversaries such as Iran carte-blanche to build their own nukes, consequently proliferating them in one of the most unstable and war-torn areas on Earth. ^{Detailed Explanation} The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty specifically bans signatories other than the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France from building their own nuclear weapons, with the only exception to this being if a direct adversary has nukes and said nuclear program is in some way official. At the time it was adopted, only Israel, India and Pakistan did not sign the treaty; all three would go on to develop nuclear weapons, but while India and Pakistan have both officially declared their programs (mostly because their primary targets are each other, although India does have some nukes pointed at China), Israel kept its program under wraps for some time since its primary purpose was to deter Middle Eastern powers which oppose its existence, with Iran chief among them, even though these nations do not possess nukes (this makes Israel the only nuclear country whose arsenal is intended to deter non-nuclear foes). While Iran does have nuclear ambitions (its current government is radically different from the one that signed the treaty) and could theoretically disregard or leave the treaty to build nukes to neutralize the threat, since Israel's arsenal is not officially declared, this would practically invite parties such as the U.S. to come in and "take care" of the problem, so for this and other reasons, mostly everyone, including the U.S., plays along.
• Due to ongoing hostilities between them and Israel, the following nations will refuse entry if they see an Israeli entry/exit stamp or visa: Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. To get around this, Israel no longer stamps foreign passports at Ben-Gurion Airport as of January 2013, giving passengers a piece of paper instead. Passports are still (as of February 2013) stamped at Erez when traveling into and out of Gaza. Also, the passports are still stamped (as of February 2014) at the Jordan Valley/Sheikh Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin/Arava land borders with Jordan.
• There is an urban legend, believed even by many Israelis themselves, that it's illegal to raise pigs on Israeli soil - supposedly in order to placate the Kosher crazy religious crowd - and that this has led to some people raising their pigs on top of elevated platforms, not touching the ground. This myth was most likely spread by Israelis opposed to the country's religious status quo laws in a sort of strawman attack to show how ridiculous they are.

Japan

• According to Japanese law, a suspect has extensive rights to be protected against abuse and can only be held in custody without incrimination for 28 days at most (at which point a judge cannot prolong it anymore). In practice, there's no law saying that the suspect can have his lawyer present (and in fact, the police can outright bar the suspect from meeting him until the trial), and there's no rule saying they can't arrest you again the moment you step out of the cell.
• Ain't no rule a cat can't be a train station master in Japan.
• Ain't no rule that says fictional robot cats can't serve as ambassadors in the Japanese government.
• Or a rule that says Virtual YouTubers can't serve as the tourism ambassador.
• Japanese immigration laws are notoriously restrictive unless you are the descendant of a Japanese citizen. However, ain't no rule that descendants cannot be adopted into the family... and ain't no age restriction for adoption either.^note Adult adoption is actually common in Japan, due to the culture putting more value on the family name (and its survival) than in biological descent. In some infamous cases, wanted South American criminals with no Japanese ancestry just paid a South American with Japanese ancestors to adopt them as adults, then used the "family connection" to flee to Japan.
• In Japan, gambling is illegal. So you can't exchange the balls you win in a pachinko parlor for cash. But technically, the parlors only let you exchange the balls for various items which can be taken to another nearby store that would then "buy" the items. That's why poker chips, slot-machine tokens, and paper tickets won at fairs were invented in the first place: they're a way to sidestep gambling laws.
• The tiny "kei car" class of cars sold in Japan originated during post-World War 2 times to allow Japanese citizens to buy a car at a price they would normally pay for a motorcycle and are still valuable today thanks to being taxed less in addition to their excellent fuel economy. These, too, were also exempt from emissions and safety tests until a few decades later.
• The electric REVAi, or G-Wiz, which is better known as being similar to the kei car, being so small and underpowered it was legally a "heavy quadbike," allowing it to dodge safety regulations. However, these are not as well liked as the kei car due to the many issues with the car.
• Japanese whalers are infamous for claiming to do all their captures for "research" purposes because the 1982 international moratorium on whaling only applies to commercial whaling but allows captures for scientific research. When filmed by anti-whaling activists, crews will even hold up bilingual signs claiming that their work is for research purposes only. Mysteriously, whale meat keeps popping up in Japanese fish markets, but only two peer-reviewed whale research papers have come out of Japan since 2005...
• On a weird note, similar to the immigration laws above, the Japanese censorship laws are very strict, which requires every explicit adult works, be it live-action (commonly referred as AVs or JAVs, short for Japanese Adult Videos) or drawn/animated ones meant to be sold locally to censor the genitalia shown in them. However, uncensored JAVs and anime porn still exist. How you may ask? In addition to obvious reasons like the studios being owned by the yakuza (which, as it implies, many do not really care about hygiene as mainstream adult studios do) or for foreign releases (which is the case for hentai anime released in US), the law does not state about censoring Japanese works made by foreign studios/companies meant to be sold for international market, so some studios do just that: make a foreign HQ office address, but produce their works locally in Japan, meant to be distributed internationally (meaning most Japanese can still buy/download them).
• When Japan was developing its own space program, it ran into a problem. Its constitution forbids the development of weapons unless they were made for defensive purposes. It's kind of hard to say a rocket that could be used as a ballistic missile, as it and space program technologies tend to be related, wouldn't break the "defensive only weapons development" clause. However, a missile is defined as a rocket with active guidance systems. The scientists instead simply launched the rocket from a position that pointed it as close to the target as possible, used fin and/or spin stabilization to keep the rocket on its path, and only use a guidance system at the very last moment to get the payload into its final orbit.
• A lot of Japan's live music is performed in "live houses", which can simply be described as small night clubs where dancing is not allowed and live music served. Strictly speaking, by that definition, live houses should be regulated as a venue of entertainment and subject to laws applicable to movie theatres and concert halls. However, most live houses are registered simply as bars, owing to the law being easier to comply with (entertainment venues are required to have certain standards on ventilation, smoking areas, and the number of toilets, etc), and it's not unusual for restaurants and bars to serve live music. By extension, tickets to these events are taken to be tickets for a drink in the venue rather than the music, which means redeeming the drink is mandatory in such places.

Korea

• Crown Prince Sado, of the The House of I, suffered from mental illnesses that led to him becoming a serial murderer who slew several court officials. His father, King Yeongjo, wanted to be rid of him, but was faced with two hurdles. The first was that, as members of the royal family, both he and Sado were considered divinity, so he could not even raise a hand to Sado. The second was that laws of the time mandated punishment for the convicted's family, so he couldn't afford to have Sado tried and convicted, for it would mean death or exile for Sado's son, the only male heir to the dynasty. Yeongjo, however, managed to find a way to dispose of his murderous son: by ordering him to climb into an empty rice chest, sealing it shut, and leaving him to die of starvation.

Malaysia

• The Malayan Emergency of 1948 to 1960 was, for all intents and purposes, a guerrilla war against communist insurgents. The name, however, was used at the insistence of the owners of rubber plantations and tin mines because if it had been called a "war" they would not have been insured against damages by Lloyd's of London.

Mongolia

• The Mongols had rules against spilling noble blood over the ground. As a result, they found creative ways to kill nobles that didn't spill blood over the ground:
  • Jamukha, former childhood friend of Genghis Khan turned rival for the title of Khan of all Mongols, boiled some of Genghis Khan's generals alive in a giant cauldron.
  • Jamukha himself was bent backward until his backbone snapped.
  • Oghul Qaimish, the widow of a Khan who plotted to murder his successor, was put in a felt sack and drowned in a river after her plot was discovered.
  • Inalchuq, the governor of Otrar and an uncle of the Shah of Khwarezm, was killed by pouring molten silver in his eyes and ears. Sounds familiar?
  • Mstislav III of Kiev and other Rus’ nobles were put under wooden planks and suffocated while the Mongol generals dined on top of them.
  • Al-Mustasim, the last Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, was rolled up in a rug and trampled to death by the Mongol cavalry. But no blood touched the ground!

Philippines

• Campaign advertisements for election candidates in the Philippines are naturally subject to regulation, but aspiring politicos tend to get around this by putting up thinly-veiled television commercials prior to the actual campaign period, for as long as they have the resources. As a matter of fact, the courts ruled in favour of this, much to the chagrin of those opposed to said practice over grounds of fairness and corruption (as those who are able to have a head start at campaigning months before the election period would have a rather unfair advantage over those who either could not fund commercials at that point or chose not to do so by principle), based on the technicality that the COMELEC (Commission on Elections) has no jurisdiction over any publicity campaigns by (would-be) candidates until the actual election season starts.
• And on a related note, while those running for public office are banned from making appearances (e.g. actors, musicians and celebrities in general) in films, television programmes and the like, their prior roles in a particular show can and will influence the results of an election as a result of the publicity generated by said appearances. An example of this would be veteran actor Lito Lapid whose role as a Loveable Rogue leader of a rebel group-turned-vigilante operation in the wildly popular Ang Probinsyano (2015) led the masses to root for him for his role in Ang Probinsyano, and thus re-elect him as a senator. Both Lapid and fellow Probinsyano alumni Jhong Hilario had their characters killed off for them to be able to bid for public office, but their roles have made them so much of a household name that they won by role recognition alone regardless.
• The Filipino programmers charged with the creation of the highly-destructive ILOVEYOU virus were not charged with anything by Philippine state prosecutors because there were no laws in the Philippines regarding malware at the time.^note Which would later be rectified with Republic Act No. 8792, otherwise known as the E-Commerce Law, and later the controversial Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 So, yes, they got away with crippling millions of computers and caused billions of dollars in damages worldwide because the Philippine justice system was behind the times — something Filipinos old enough to remember the hubbub view with a peculiar mix of misplaced pride and sheepish embarrassment. In an interesting aside, Onel de Guzman, the man responsible for unleashing the bug, turned out to be just running a small cellphone repair shop somewhere in Manila decades later, far from the rumours that he was hired by Microsoft or the US government as a white-hat hacker.
• The late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos was allowed by the Supreme Court to be buried at the Heroes' Cemetery (Libingan ng mga Bayani in Filipino) simply because of this trope (cue backlash); he was never convicted by final judgment on any offense and due to the principle of civilian control over the military, his ouster as president (and in effect, commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces) during the EDSA Revolution of 1986 does not count as dishonorable discharge from the service. To clarify further, those two items mentioned earlier disqualify someone from being buried there.
• In 2013, Filipino singer-songwriter Freddie Aguilar, who was 60 at the time, married his then 16-year-old girlfriend. They both converted to Islam in the process, as the Philippines recognises Sharia law, and according to Islamic custom, there is nothing keeping anyone from marrying a woman for as long as she had her first period. Most people were unsurprisingly upset about the affair as either being borderline to outright creepy for someone who is by most jurisdictions a minor to fall in love with an old man, or that the teen and her family were merely riding on Aguilar's fame. Regardless, people came to view the singer-songwriter as a hypocrite for writing a song about a prodigal son only for him to turn out to be failing to practice what he preached.
  • This appears to have been patched when Rodrigo Duterte enacted Republic Act No. 11596 or the Anti-Child Marriage Act which criminalises marriages of persons under eighteen years of age, i.e. anyone trying to repeat what Freddie did with his then-child bride would end up in the slammer.
• In 2020 the Philippine government through the National Telecommunications Commission ordered ABS-CBN to shut down its broadcast operations, a draconian and underhanded move (especially considering the state of affairs during the COVID-19 Pandemic) suspected to be having more to do with President Rodrigo Duterte's fiery rants against the station being allegedly critical of his policies than with any and all corruption charges the company may have been involved with. The shutdown covered terrestrial broadcasts through traditional television as well as radio, but it technically did not cover internet streaming and their TV Plus freemium digital television service, so a number of programmes such as MOR Radio and TV Patrol have resumed their usual coverage. ABS-CBN simply moved to being a media production house in the interim, not unlike Solar Entertainment where they lease blocktime agreements with smaller television networks.

Thailand

• Thai massage parlors are infamous for prostitution. After sex and oral sex were banned, they moved primarily to handjobs. When a law was passed banning masseuses from touching their clients' genitals with their hands as well, what was the masseuses' response? To begin using their wrists.
• Thailand has a special treatment for pickup trucks by exempting them from excise duties which were ridiculously high for standard passenger cars. With strong utilities and capability to carry more people on cargo beds, the pickups become extremely popular in Thailand. Even Japanese-branded trucks have their production moved from Japan to pickup-mad Thailand due to strong popularity, amidst the weakening sales (and later, straight-up extinction) of pickup trucks in Japan caused by harsh laws against them.

Africa

Egypt

• Hatshepsut was crowned Pharaoh, a masculine title, and dressed up in drag (to the point of wearing a wig on her chin and going around topless) after the death of her husband (and half-brother) Thutmose II. Ain't no rule the Pharaoh has to be a man.
• The State of Emergency proclaimed in Egypt during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 lasted until 2012 with only an 18-month long break in 1980-1981. It was reinstated in January 2013.

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