Suddenly Significant Rule

This is when a rule or law that is usually not given much thought is suddenly invoked. This can happen because:

1. The rule is obscure and outdated or little used, but it's dusted off because it can allow or disallow a course of action.
2. The rule is well known, but is given little thought because it's expected that everyone will follow it—and then it comes into play when someone doesn't.
3. A Rules Lawyer uses the rule as a trump card.
4. The circumstances of the rule coming into play are unlikely.

This is distinct from Loophole Abuse, which deals with getting around the rules, while this deals with following them, but there can be either overlap when invoking one rule allows someone to get around another, or exclusion when this means that a loophole that seemed to exist actually doesn't.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• A bit spoileriffic example from The Law of Ueki: The characters get special powers to participate in a tournament to decide who's gonna be the next God (since the current one wants to quit). There are two rules: If a participant attacks a normal person with his powers, the attacker loses one sai (talents, unique qualities of every person), and losing all your sais means you stop existing; but after a tournament fight, the winner gets a new sai. This becomes irrelevant after the first stage since the rest of the tournament is held up in Heaven, there's not normal humans outside of contestants, and everyone who got that far already won a lot of sais.
  Cue to the climax, the Big Bad gets cornered and gets out of the tournament, meaning that every time the Hero attacks he loses one sai. Meanwhile, the Hero ends up down to one sai, with another hit he will win the fight but also his existence will end. He attacks anyway but doesn't disappear because in the middle of the fight, he accidentally blasted away a poor Comic Relief, which gave him an additional sai.
• In the Mahjong manga Tetsunaki no Kirinji, the main protagonist is almost certain to win an important match with a great starting hand, however he is so distracted by his great fortune that he didn't notice the other 3 players discarding the same wind tile and he discards the fourth, meaning the match is aborted. This is due to the "consecutive four wind discard" rule, that every mahjong player knows but it simply never appears in normal gameplay and thus the protagonist was careless in a crucial moment, wasting his almost guaranteed victory.

Audio Plays

• In The Eleven-Day Empire and Shadow Play, the first two Faction Paradox audios, Lolita, a Homeworld agent, conspires to have the young Faction Cousin Justine granted the unique shadow of the Faction's Grandfather. However, it turns out that under the Faction's laws, "the shadow is more important than the flesh", automatically making her guilty of the Grandfather's crimes and giving her the perfect opening to Logic Bomb the Eleven-Day Empire out of existence.

Comic Books

• In an Archie Comics scene at Veronica's backyard pool, Veronica is scheming to get rid of Betty so she can have Archie all to herself. When Betty pushes a fully dressed Archie into the pool, Veronica promptly has her banned from the pool area for the day, citing a "No horseplay" rule. Betty agrees, but slyly points out that Archie has to leave with her since he violated a rule against being in the pool with his clothes on!
• In Fables, the position of Mayor of Fabletown is technically elected, but no elections have been held since King Cole has been chosen Mayor at the town's founding centuries ago. Then Prince Charming calls for an election and runs for the position, thus throwing everything into turmoil. However, Charming then becomes a victim of this trope himself because he did not do enough research into what exactly the Mayor's powers were. Most importantly he did not realize that the witches' help is voluntary and cannot be compelled by the Mayor. They will help in emergencies but their magic is in limited supply and they refuse to use it to help Charming fulfill his campaign promises. King Cole only asked for their help in emergencies so they never had a reason to refuse before. Thus only a few Fables were aware of these restrictions and they chose not to warn Charming because they did not like him.
• In The Golden Helmet, Azure Blue and his lawyer, Sharkey, invokes an ancient law set down by Charlemagne that stated that any man who discovers new lands can claim ownership of that land, unless he should chose to give it to his liege. Donald has just discovered an old map that indicates that the viking Olaf the Blue, supposedly Azure's distant ancestor, was the first European to set foot on American soil, which would make Azure the legal owner of all of America. The rest of the comic is a race between Azure and Donald to see who can get to Olaf's supposed landing spot first and find the evidence of his claim.
  • The sequel by Don Rosa follows the same concept, but this time it deals with Donald and the boys repeatedly uncovering evidence of earlier European settlers, rendering the previous claim void... and resultig in Azure just shifting his supposed ancestry to whoever the earlier claimant was. Eventually it gets so out of hand that the United Nations just declares the old law entirely invalid, voiding every claim.
• In Green Arrow, during Oliver's tenure as mayor of Star City, he took advantage of the phrasing of the city's 200-year-old charter — specifically, that the mayor can legally marry any two "persons" to perform legal gay marriages. Later, he uses a similar stunt to ensure that his hand-picked successor will take over from him as mayor.

Fan Works

• The Golden Fist Fighting-type Tournament in Boldores And Boomsticks has a long-forgotten rule allowing Black Belts and Battle Girls to compete against the Pokémon in the tournament, as a means of testing their strength. This is used to allow Yang Xiao-Long to compete, while a provision allowing martial artists to use weapons was used to let her use Ember Celica in the finals.
• A Diplomatic Visit: In chapter 5 of the sequel Diplomat at Large, Twilight invokes a law dating back to the first Noble Council — "In the time where our allies are under attack, all those who deliberately deny or delay Equestria's support on their own volition and actively act against the principles of friendship that our nation was founded on, shall have their wealth and citizenship revoked, and be held prisoner until such time that the conflict is over as to not pose as a potential enemy within our own nation." In short, it lets her legally remove a majority of the nobles from power so the Princesses can declare war on the Storm King and his armies without interference. This rule is literally over a thousand years old and is still on the books, but she found it and made use of it. It later turns out that it wasn't actually ratified, though by that point Blueblood's gathered enough evidence of wrongdoing to have them all legally removed soon enough anyway.
• Embers (Vathara): No one has used the Shelter of Dragon's Wings rule for over 200 years, but it was still on the books. This allows Iroh to use a Fire Navy ship as shelter, despite several very good reasons they should burn him down where he stands.
• In His Honor, The Mayor, Drew Lipsky? Shego's attempt to write Drakken in as a joke candidate in the Middleton mayoral election results in him getting elected. Kim tries to use Drakken's criminal record to have him disqualified, but due to a rule dating back to the city founding regarding what crimes do and don't disqualify an official from the position, nothing in Drakken's record counts.
• In Project Delta, Jane has a lot of trouble getting the proper training due to an ancient law about outsiders being permitted on an asari colony.

Films — Live-Action

• During the final duel of The Gamers: Hands of Fate, the Big Bad seems to forget the small rule that a player may give away the reward for a quest they just completed to their opponent, who has no way of refusing it. This way, Cass gives away his Apple of Life to the Big Bad—which "resurrects" his entire undead army that promptly starves to death since it never had or needed any food production before.
• In The Princess Diaries 2, Genovian law apparently says that women have to be married to take the throne, though this has never been upheld in practice. The villain brings it up because his nephew-by-marriage is next in line after Mia.

Literature

• In The Belgariad, there is a clause in the Accords of Val Alorn with Tolnedra that says "Aloria shall maintain Riva and keep it whole." Thing is, at the time the treaty was signed, Aloria (the ancestral kingdom of the Alorns) hadn't existed in centuries: what was once that nation was split into the kingdoms of Riva, Drasnia, Cherekh, and Algaria. The last three each have peace treaties with Tolnedra. This clause comes into effect much later, when the Emperor, angered by a disastrous expedition to Riva, prepares for a full-scale invasion. The Cherekh ambassador (fully aware of the accords) sends a letter to the Emperor saying that if this invasion happens, Aloria will fulfill that clause and end Tolnedra. The Emperor realizes that while Drasnia, Cherekh, and Algaria have signed individual treaties with Tolnedra, collectively they are Aloria, with whom Tolnedra has no treaties at all. The fear that the Alorns might band together to make war haunts the Tolnedran government for centuries—and then Nyissan assassins murder the Rivan King, and Tolnedra's nightmares come true.
  • One of the clauses in the Treaty of Vo Mimbre is that a Tolnedran Princess must come to Riva and await for the King to return. Ce'Nedra is ready to go through this formality that pays homage to a long-extinct dynasty and discovers that Garion is the rightful Rivan King.
• In A Brother's Price, such a rule is part of the villains' plan. They hire someone else to kidnap Jerin so that they can then steal Jerin back from the criminals they hired, invoking a law that says that they're then allowed to keep the man they rescued from his kidnappers, as a reward for their victory over the criminals. Of course, for this to work, the hired helpers have to be killed (as the rule wouldn't apply if it was known everything was planned by one and the same family) but the villains show no remorse about this.
• Discworld:
  • Sam Vimes comes from a poor family, that had been noble until his ancestor became a regicide, and has nothing but contempt for titles as a result (technically he's a knight^note Until the end of Jingo, where he's made a duke., due to the title coming with his rank of Commander, but only the very brave or stupid would actually call him that). So when Vimes is trapped in Ankh-Morpork during the events of Jingo, Vetinari sends him a letter that only says "Samuel Vimes, Knight". Vimes doesn't get it... until he realizes that it means he's entitled to form a regiment under his command, allowing him to sail to Klatch and prevent a war.
  • In Unseen Academicals, one of the more absurd-seeming of the foot-the-ball rules is "The ball shall be called the ball. The ball is the ball that is played as the ball by any three consecutive players, at which point it is the ball." This comes in handy in the big match, when Trev Likely, who has never practiced with a spherical ball but is a master of kicking a tin can, uses it to say that, as long as the team treats the can as the ball, it's the ball.
• In Dragon Bones, Ward is told that a slave has fled to his land, Hurog, and is hiding somewhere under the castle. The nobles who lost the slave would like to get her back, but Ward tells them that there is no slave, invoking an ancient law that says that a slave who sets foot on Hurog land is automatically free. Ward's father and grandfather were jerks who would have happily assisted the nobles in their search for the escaped slaves, but Ward decides to revive the tradition. The nobles are quite annoyed.
• From The Elenium, Berit is a Novice, so he's not entitled to wear armour yet. When Sparhawk and company head off to Zemoch, they dust off the seldom-used rank of Apprentice Knight for Berit, which means he's not a full Knight, but is allowed to wear armour.
• Heralds of Valdemar: In By the Sword, a novel by Mercedes Lackey, there's an old rule that says that a mercenary company that has lost enough members can call the Captaincy to vote. The Captain of the Skybolts, Ardana, gets the boot after a disastrous campaign.
• Halo: First Strike: The Cole Protocol is a series of rules drafted for human fleets listing numerous steps they must follow to prevent the Covenant from finding Earth, such as never hyper-space jumping directly to Earth, destroying navigation intel, etc. One of the rules, Subsection 7, said to never bring back a captured Covenant vessel without thoroughly checking it for tracking devices first. However, it was mostly ignored because not until the 27th year of the war did anyone ever capture a Covenant vessel without its crew hitting the self-destruct.
• In The Knights of the Cross, when all other ways to extricate Zbyszko from his pending execution fail, princess Anna remembers a little-known law that a young man cannot be executed if a pure maiden claims him as her betrothed. Resulting in an iconic scene of Danusia doing just that.
• In Raybearer, a high-ranking judge is very upset with her emperor's attempts to erase minority cultures — one of which is the new law that families will be financially rewarded for giving their children non-minority names. So she digs up a much older law against "causing strife between a husband and wife", which no one has ever actually invoked (it was a holdover from tribal law), and finds a couple who disagree as to whether they should go for the money or not. Then she convicts the king of causing strife between them.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Ironborn people have restored their old tradition of Elective Monarchy, when the kings are elected on a council called Kingsmoot. A Kingsmoot is assembled, and a tyrannical evil sorcerer wins the election. Said sorcerer's niece and rival Asha Greyjoy goes into exile to the North, and one of her followers suddenly reminds her of one rule of Kingsmoot about which everyone forgot: if a Kingsmoot was assembled and at least one candidate with a significant claim to the crown was absent, it is invalid. Thus Asha decides to rescue her brother Theon from captivity in order to invalidate the Kingsmoot through him.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga novel A Civil Campaign the nobleman Count Vormuir from the somewhat socially and legally backward and decidedly Schizo Tech planet Barrayar hits upon the "brilliant" scheme of providing for more subjects for himself by harvesting unwanted eggs from the reproduction clinic in his district capital and personally providing the sperm, with all resulting children born in Uterine Replicators. All of them are girls (to take further advantage of the fact that the introduction of advanced genetic technology to Barrayar has resulted in a noticeable imbalance in the number of boys to girls in that traditionally patriarchal society). Under existing Barrayaran law, every single one of these children are Vormuir's acknowledged bastards, and he claims legal custody. The planetary emperor is forced to allow Vormuir's custody claim—but dusts off the old laws regarding the duty of a high-born father to provide dowries for his acknowledged female bastards—in Vormuir's case, one hundred and eighteen dowries.
• In the World of the Five Gods, trying and failing to perform death magic on someone is legally attempted murder and punishable by execution. Successfully performing death magic, on the other hand, is legally a miracle of divine justice and not punishable. Since a succesful death miracle also inevitably kills the caster, this is mostly just a priestly technicality... until Cazaril petitions for a death miracle, gets one, and then survives due to the effects of a second miracle.

Live-Action TV

• Reality TV competitions and Game Shows in general have many, many more rules than a casual viewer needs to know. Little-known and usually behind-the-scenes rules often only come up when they're about to be broken. For example, if The Amazing Race reminds viewers about requirements for teams to take a certain mode of transportation, you can be sure someone is about to mess up.
• For someone to be in Canada's Worst Driver in the first place, they must be a legal driver, having both license and insurance. Thus, the only attention those rules usually get during the rest of the show is mere mentioning. But in Season 6, Scott Schurink's nominator (who let Scott drive on his insurance) realized what an ass Scott was and cancelled Scott's insurance during filming. Since Scott couldn't pay for his own insurance (which would cost him $1,200 per month), he got kicked off the show.
• The Commish. In "Sleep of the Just", a rapist has Diplomatic Impunity, so the police harass him by ticketing for obscure and long-obsolete violations of the law, like sneezing in public (it frightens the horses). When he tears up the ticket and throws it away, he's cited for littering, which is illegal in any century.
• Deputy: The central conceit of the series is that the rules of succession in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department suddenly becoming very important. The town charter (most recently updated in 1850) states that in the event of the sheriff's untimely demise, the position shall be filled until the next election by "the longest serving member of the sheriff's mounted posse". In 1850 the mounted posse would have consisted of the sheriff's most senior and trusted deputies. In 2020, the LASD Mounted Division (the only part of the LASD that still uses horses) is a dumping ground for all the misfits the LASD can't fire, who are instead shipped off to the rural outskirts of LA county until they either straighten out or leave voluntarily. So, naturally, the new Sheriff is Bill Hollister, the only man contrary enough to be shipped off to the sticks, and ornery enough to actually make a career of it.
• In the Doctor Who serial "Paradise Towers", the Doctor does this by making up a rule; he exploits the Deputy Chief Caretaker's simultaneous hyper-bureaucratic nature and imperfect knowledge of the rulebook by claiming there's an obscure rule in his rulebook which requires the guards to stand down, walk five paces away from the prisoner, close their eyes, put their hands over their heads and wait a minute and a half. This, not coincidentally, is exactly how long the Doctor needs to find the right keycard and escape.
• Forged in Fire, as the name suggests, is a forging competition, meaning that the blades created for the challenges must be forged into their final shape. This rule went unnoticed for the first season and most of the second, because the metal used usually had to be forged to make a viable blade (and none of the contestants were stupid enough to try not forging it). However, in one late episode where lawnmower blades were used, a contestant decided to grind the blade into a knife shape, instead of forging it. The resulting knife was not valid under the rules, resulting in the contestant's elimination.
• In Game of Thrones, Yara Greyjoy expects to succeed her father, Balon, after his murder and become the first queen of the Iron Islands, since her brother has been castrated and failed so badly at a military campaign that he does not feel himself worthy of the throne. However, she is taken aback when she learns she must get the support of the islands' other nobles at the "kingsmoot", where her uncle Euron is chosen king instead.
• In Kaamelott, King Arthur, who lusts after a knight's wife, avoids a deathmatch with his knight by using an outdated law that allows him to swap his wife for the knight's wife.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Ensigns of Command," the Enterprise crew faces off against the Sheilak Corporate, a group of Scary Dogmatic Aliens whose hat is obsessing over rules and contracts. The Sheilak are planning to colonize a planet in their own territory, only to find a group of Federation settlers (descended from those who crashed their ship decades earlier) have made a home there. It will take three weeks for a transport vessel to move the settlers, but the Sheilak insist on sticking to the exact terms of their original treaty with the Federation and threaten to kill the colonists as soon as they arrive. Picard has his crew go through the document with a fine-tooth comb and eventually finds a never-used clause that allows him to name a neutral third party to arbitrate the dispute...and promptly selects a race that's currently hibernating and won't be awake for six months. The Outgambitted Corporate begrudgingly agrees to the three-week extension.

Politics

• The Soviet Union was technically a confederation. When Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed the restrictive policies of the USSR, the constituent republics remembered this and split off.
• Surprisingly, many U.S. constitutional crises are ultimately due to this. Either a rule was formulated once and then largely forgotten or a rule was worded very unclearly and its interpretation in modern times makes for endless debates. Just take the Second Amendment or whatever a "natural-born citizen" is supposed to be. The constitutional crisis is caused by a lack of stable/generally accepted leadership that allows many somewhat powerful politicians to either claim leadership for themselves or reject the leadership of someone else. The reason obscure laws or unorthodox interpretations are used is that if they say "screw it, all power to me" and ditch the rulebook (the constitution) altogether, then it is a legitimate free-for-all for everyone, meaning their seats are contested as well. They want to get to the top of the pyramid without bringing it down.
• In the last years of the Weimar Republic none of the governments had a positive parliamentary majority behind them. However, the chancellor was appointed by the President and the President was allowed to make "Emergency Orders" (Notverordnungen) under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. While they could be thrown out by a majority of the parliament voting against them, the President also had the power to dissolve the parliament at any point he pleased and call new elections. When parliament was not in session, the Emergency Orders could not be voided by it, and hence Brüning, von Papen, and Schleicher (the last three chancellors before Hitler) could in essence govern without parliament so long as the President supported their agenda. This backfired hard and the Nazis got more and more votes until eventually (after the Nazis got 45% of the vote and could get a majority with a coalition with another far-right party) President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. Hitler proceeded to introduce and pass a law giving him the power to make any laws he wished, including those going against letter and spirit of the constitution. The question of whether the "Ain't No Rule" justification the Nazis used was legit has never been conclusively answered, but suffice to say the constitution of The Bonn Republic and The Berlin Republic (which is the same document in essence) is anal-retentive about none of that ever happening ever again.
• Prior to the treaty of Lisbon there was no rule for leaving the EU (which is not to say it did not happen, both Greenland and the former French territory that is now Algeria were technically part of predecessors of the EU at some point in time), however that treaty explicitly introduced a rule, mostly summed up in article 50. Article 50 establishes that whatever the new relationship between the former EU member and the "rest-EU" is going to be has to be negotiated within two years, otherwise the new relationship will be the "default" of the EU relations to any non-EU country with no special rights or obligations. However, there is a way around the two-year deadline, as Britain showed in light of the "Brexit" vote. The referendum technically being non-binding, Article 50 is not triggered until Parliament (the only body in Britain that can make laws) explicitly makes a law to leave the EU under article 50. And there Ain't No Rule that they have to do it now — or at any point from now until the sun turns into a red giant. So while Article 50 as originally worded provides for a (in political terms) quick and clean divorce, a loophole nobody seems to have foreseen enables countries to leave and not leave the EU at the same time.
• In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, a Minnesota electoral college voter pledged to Democratic candidate John Kerry voted instead for Kerry's running-mate, John Edwards to be president. It's still unclear whether this was intentional or not, but the state legislature responded to this by changing electoral college votes to being public instead of anonymous and barring electors from voting for candidates other than whom they were officially pledged. Come the 2016 election, another Minnesota elector tried to vote for Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton (who had come dangerously close to being the first Democratic candidate to lose the state in 44 years), but thanks to the change in state law, was unable to do so.
• In the United States, many state-level abortion restrictions existed on the books for decades or even centuries before being voided by the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. However, many of those laws were never formally repealed by the states. When the Supreme Court later overturned Roe in 2022, several states insisted that those long-dormant laws were immediately in force again.

Sports

• On July 24, 1983, Major League Baseball slugger George Brett of the Kansas City Royals hit a two-run home run with two outs in the ninth inning, giving his team a 5-4 lead. Then, New York Yankees manager Billy Martin brought to the attention of the umpire that Brett's bat had too much pine tar on it. ^ExplanationPine tar is used so the player can have a better grip on the bat. The rules of the time said you couldn't have more than 18 inches of pine tar on the bat, but Brett regularly used more than 24 inches. The rule was originally made to keep the home team from having to replace too many discolored balls, but as time progressed and balls became cheaper, the rule's reason wasn't valid anymore. Martin had known that Brett was using more pine tar than the rules allowed for quite some time, but nobody else noticed and Martin kept it to himself until it proved useful during a game. The umpire ruled Brett out on an illegally batted ball, which meant the Yankees won. After the game, the Royals protested to the league, and the AL president upheld the protest, so the game was restarted on August 18th from the point of Brett's home run (the Royals won 5-4, but not before Martin tried to have Brett called out for not touching all the bases — his intent was frustrated when the umpire pulled out a signed affidavit from the umpires of the first game saying that Brett did in fact touch them all). The rule was later modified to say that if nobody complained before the batter hit a ball, the violation doesn't nullify the play. See the whole thing here (Brett makes a particularly nice Dynamic Entry at 2:40 when he's called out).
• The 1999 Cricket World Cup had a rule to decide which team would go to the final if the semi-final was tied: the team that won the match played between the same opponents in the earlier stages. Rather dramatically, one of the semi-finals between Australia and South Africa ended in a tie, thus invoking this rule and letting Australia enter into the finals since they won the said previous match. South Africa would have easily won that previous match, if not for one of their best fielders, Hershchelle Gibbs dropping a catch letting off Australia captain, Steve Waugh, who went on to win the game for Australia. South Africa had dominated the World Cup until then, so the dropped catch and the defeat was considered mostly insignificant as South Africa was expected to win the World Cup anyway.
• In Olympic gymnastics, it was technically possible to get a 10/10 score—but this was so unlikely that scoreboards only went up to 9.99. Then Nadia Comăneci to pull off a perfect score in 1976—which, due to the technical limitation, was displayed as an abysmal 1.00. After that, scoreboards went up to 10.
• Keith Olbermann makes a point that "Merkle's boner", a famous mistake by a rookie in 1908 that won the Chicago Cubs the National League pennant and ultimately their last World Series until 2016, was this. See this video.
• In 1987, the NCAA passed a rule change that allowed any conference with at least 12 football members to split into divisions and hold a championship game between the divisional winners, with said game not counting against either team's limit on regular-season contests. The rule was proposed by two Division II conferences but applied throughout the NCAA. The two D-II conferences that proposed the change ended up not implementing it immediately due to changes in that division's playoff format. However, Roy Kramer, then commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, one of the leagues that would eventually become part of the so-called Power Five, noticed that the SEC had 10 members. If it added two more... you get the picture. Cue the SEC adding Arkansas and South Carolina in 1991 and launching its championship game the next year. The game was enough of a cash cow that every other conference in what is now Division I FBS eventually followed suit.
• If it happened in the NFL, Bill Belichick was probably involved:
  • The old "tuck rule" used by the National Football League from 1999 until 2013, where if a passer's arm is going forward when he is being hit and loses control of the football it counts as an incomplete pass rather than a fumble, even if his arm is going towards his body to tuck the ball away for ball security. It had been on the books for a couple years, but most football fans will remember it for affecting the outcome of the "Tuck Rule Game", the AFC Divisional Round game in the 2001-02 playoffs between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots. Raiders are up 13-10, but the Patriots are able to get to Oakland's 42-yard line with 1:50 left in the 4th quarter. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady then gets hit while bringing his arm forward and loses the ball, which the Raiders recovered. It was initially ruled a fumble, which would have meant the Raiders would win because they could run out the clock as the Patriots had no timeouts, but the referees pulled in the tuck rule to rule it an incomplete pass, letting the Patriots keep the ball. With the second life, the Patriots got into field goal range and tied the game, before winning in overtime and going on to win the rest of the way to the Super Bowl, starting the Patriots dynasty. Patriots coach Bill Belichick remembered that rule in particular as the Patriots had been on the other end of that ruling earlier in the season back in September against the New York Jets where Jets quarterback Vinny Testeverde had lost the ball on a similar play as the Jets were driving down but the tuck rule meant the Jets were able to continue their drive, kick a game-tying field goal, and later win the game.
  • In the finale of the 2006 regular season, the Patriots played Miami with nothing on the line. Their seeding was secured. After a touchdown, Belichick sent out backup QB Doug Flutie to attempt a drop kick, a means of placekicking that was still allowed but hadn't been attempted since 1941.
  • In the 2015 playoffs, the Patriots were trailing the Baltimore Ravens. The rulebook states that 5 players have to be ineligible receivers, and every team simply used offensive linemen for this purpose. Belichick sent out 4 offensive linemen and an extra tight end, then had whichever player was ineligible report to the referee and be announced as such on each play. The Ravens' defense struggled to identify which players were receivers and the Patriots used the confusion to come back and win the game.

Urban Legends

• There was a student at an English university who invoked a law where the university was to provide tea (sometimes ale) and cakes to students during examinations. They provided the modern equivalent, a Coke and a burger... then fined him for not wearing his sword according to an equally forgotten law.

Video Games

• In Fallout: New Vegas, one of the rules of the Brotherhood of Steel, "The Chain that Binds", ensures that the chain of command within the Brotherhood is always adhered to. It's mostly just invoked when a lower-ranked member is insubordinate to a higher-ranked one, but it also requires those of superior rank not to give orders to those who do not report directly to them and can be grounds for having a Brotherhood Elder demoted and replaced if you decide to support Paladin Hardin's attempt to depose Elder MacNamara.

Visual Novels

• In The Great Ace Attorney, any jurist on the jury can declare their verdict at any time, if they feel the truth of the case is clear. If, at any point, all six jurors are unanimous in their verdict, the trial immediately ends. However, the first time this happens (with all six jurors voting guilty against the protagonist Ryonosuke's client), his assistant points out that, according to an ancient law, the defence has the right to a "summation examination", where they can interview the jurists and attempt to persuade them to change their verdict. All present are stunned, since, while the law has been on the books for ages, no one has ever bothered to use it in recent memory; the prosecutor even argues that the law is clearly defunct as a result, having fallen into obvious disuse. However, the judge rules that the law is still valid and, as a result, the defence makes heavy use of it for every subsequent trial that includes a jury.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The issue of evidence law comes up in the fifth episode. Previously nobody had to worry about how evidence was presented to the trial.

Webcomics

• The framing device for Cobweb and Stripes is that Betelgeuse has been arrested for an unspecified crime. Rather than serve out his sentence in the normal way, he invokes an ancient and rarely-used magical law that enables him to be bound to a living human until his trial. He figures that Lydia sort of owes him for not going through with their marriage as she agreed, and so he volunteers her for the task. She can't get out of it, so she goes along with it, and they're both surprised to find that they actually like each other — enough to continue the relationship even after they're no longer bound.
• Exiern: One of the leaders of the Church of Rem is publicly outed as being part of a cabal of pedophiles. Rather than face justice through the courts, he invokes a magical Trial by Combat. This irks King Urtica to no end, who knew about the rule but didn't expect him to invoke it, because if he wins, he's exonerated and no justice will be actually be done, yet the King's hands are tied by tradition.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court the threat of this is used as leverage on Antimony's father to force him to return. The Court caught Antimony cheating on her schoolwork, but rather than address academic dishonesty in any normal fashion they instead threaten to pretend to not have noticed until the last moment, then use it to expel her immediately before graduation. There's minor evidence that this is a pattern. They employ obvious obstacles students can get around while also surveilling them through subtler methods, then they do nothing about any rules they break — but if the Court wants something suddenly those rules can be very important.
• Used to literally save the world in The Order of the Stick: Just before the vampire-dominated dwarven council can finish a vote that would have resulted in the gods destroying the world, one of the non-dominated elders suspends the session because the rules require them to meet at a table with certain specifications — and Durkon's thrown hammer has just caused a falling rock to destroy said table. This prevents the vote from taking place until they can replace it, which gives the heroes plenty of time to deal with the vampires.
  Sigdi Thundershield: Were ye really so dumb ta think fer one second tha ye could beat Durkon — Durkon o' all the folks in this great big beaut'ful world — in a fight tha revolved around followin tha rules?!?

Western Animation

• In one episode of The Jetsons, Cogswell bribes a crooked commissioner to enforce the B.E.B.O.P law (Basic Electro Bionic Operations Permit) as part of a plan to shut down Spacely's factory to prevent him from making a million sprockets for his millionth cog (the paperwork needed for Spacely to go back online would take four weeks). One of the side effects of the trick was that Rosie had to marry Mack to prevent him from being melted down.
• In Phineas and Ferb episode "My Fair Goalie", Ferb is affected by soccer's "Emu Curse", which states that if you're holding the ball and a herd of emus carries off your assistant coach, then you're cursed to never be on a winning team again. Despite the improbability of this happening in the middle of the United States, it happens, leading Ferb to abandon the game. The only way to break the Emu Curse is to have a boy in a Sunday bonnet sing E-flat above high C in front of the cursed one. During the game, Candace's Sunday bonnet falls off and falls onto Baljeet's head just before he's hit in the groin by the ball, causing him to scream at a frequency that just happens to be E-flat above high C while Ferb is in the vicinity, thus breaking his curse and allowing their team to win the game.
• The Simpsons: "Homer Vs. The 18th Amendment" hinges on this. When several vocal townspeople protest alcohol consumption and demand prohibition, the city officials are ready to dismiss them out of hand until a clerk in the room happens to find a 200-year-old prohibition law that was passed but had never been enforced. Funnily enough, this is inverted at the end of the episode when the same clerk finds on the same parchment that the law was repealed a year after being put in place, invalidating Homer's crimes.
• Wild West COW Boys Of Moo Mesa: In "Wedding Bull Blues", Mayor Bulloney tries to seize Colonel Cudster's assets by enforcing a law that says every Cowtown citizen who isn't heard from in 7 years is declared dead and, if the citizen in question didn't leave a will, the citizen's assets go to the town. Colonel Cudster sends his daughter a letter every year but the Mayor sent the Masked Bull to steal them. Marshall Moo Montana finds the mail pigeon with Colonel Cudster's latest letter, preventing him from being declared dead.

---