Linux Law

        Idaho state law makes it illegal for a man to give his sweetheart
a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds.

If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it
is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.
                -- Joseph C. Goulden

If a man stay away from his wife for seven years, the law presumes the
separation to have killed him; yet according to our daily experience,
it might well prolong his life.
                -- Charles Darling, "Scintillae Juris, 1877

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
                -- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)

If reporters don't know that truth is plural, they ought to be lawyers.
                -- Tom Wicker

If there were a school for, say, sheet metal workers, that after three
years left its graduates as unprepared for their careers as does law
school, it would be closed down in a minute, and no doubt by lawyers.
                -- Michael Levin, "The Socratic Method

        In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers."  That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts.  Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided.  Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
        According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population.  The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants.  This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack."  Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
                -- Motor Trend, May 1983

In Blythe, California, a city ordinance declares that a person must own
at least two cows before he can wear cowboy boots in public.

In Boston, it is illegal to hold frog-jumping contests in nightclubs.

In Columbia, Pennsylvania, it is against the law for a pilot to tickle
a female flying student under her chin with a feather duster in order
to get her attention.