If you are new here, hello. My name is Elie Mystal. I’m no longer a lawyer, but I play one on TV. I’m also a columnist and author. I talk and write because I’m not good at marching and fighting. I approach the law from the perspective of activism and advocacy, which is an intellectually acceptable way of saying that I’m biased as fuck. I’m biased toward fairness, toward racial and social justice, and toward gender equality. I also like puppies. I’m prejudiced against stupidity, violence, slavery and colonization, and the unearned privileges enjoyed by the enslavers and colonists and their progeny. I’m also not particularly fond of cats. Like, I respect them and all, but a dog is a friend, while a cat has merely decided to allow you to live for the time being.
Obviously, I think my biases are righteous and other people’s biases are misguided, but it’s important to understand when reading me that I’m not trying to convince other people. You can read many books that try to appeal to and persuade people on “both sides” of an issue, but that is not my mission. This isn’t a remedial law class for fairness-curious Republicans who wonder what the world would look like if their grandfathers had been better people.
I’m not trying to convince people who disagree with me; I’m trying to arm people who want the same things I want with the legal and political arguments to fight for the world they want to see. Politicians and lawyers will defend the indefensible with carefully tested arguments that hint at having special knowledge beyond the reach of most people. But this is false. People who write laws don’t actually know anything that is beyond the comprehension of most citizens. They’re not scientists working at the cutting edge of particle physics; they’re more like customer service reps whose solutions to most problems boil down to “turn it off, then turn it back on.”
I’m not trying to convince people who disagree with me; I’m trying to arm people who want the same things I want with the legal and political arguments to fight for the world they want to see.
This book will give you arguments to deploy against the forces of injustice, along with demands you can make of your elected representatives. The next time a politician responds to a mass shooting with “thoughts and prayers,” you can respond with the specific law you’d like to see repealed instead. The next time a politician says “Don’t say gay,” you can tell them where to stick their euphemism because you’ll be aware of all the intentional bigotry such laws require.
I’ve focused the book around laws and issues I think both do great harm and can easily be solved by simple repeal — something Congress (or a state legislature) is completely empowered to do. Our broken Constitution forces us to make many choices, but the laws in this book can be repealed outright with no Constitutional concerns. We could all wake up tomorrow and simply decide to do better and vote for people with a more robust appreciation for fairness and equality.
America has tens of thousands of active federal, state, and local laws, rules, and statutes. I haven’t read all of them, though I’m told by people I trust that many of them are stupid. But I’m not interested in the knuckleheaded stuff. I don’t care that there’s a law in Alabama that makes it illegal to chain your alligator to a fire hydrant (for obvious firefighter-safety reasons, I imagine) or one in New Jersey that makes it illegal to “frown” at a police officer (even when the officer is harassing you).
The laws in this book, from felony murder and the Hyde Amendment to “illegal reentry” for immigrants and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, are ones that we could just be rid of. They don’t need to be reformed, and they don’t need to be reimagined for our current age; they need to be burned out of our system with fire and have their ashes weighted to the bottom of the ocean. While they may not all be familiar to everyone, these laws have an outsized detrimental impact on ordinary people today. They represent deeply flawed choices and were passed to codify some of the worst instincts of our society.
To put it another way: These are the laws that piss me off the most. These are the ones that make me scream at my television and call my congressperson and submit “audience questions” (which never get picked) at presidential primary debates.
The law is not an accident. It is a plan. It is written with intentionality by people who want to shape society in one way or another. In our society, that shape is distorted to benefit a ruling class of white male elites and the industries and opportunities those elites control. It’s not an accident that I wrote this book fueled by coffee and cigarettes instead of by cocaine and opium. It’s the law. It’s, probably, a good law. Let’s talk about some of the bad ones.
Copyright© 2025 by Elie Mystal. This excerpt originally appeared in Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
MORE BOOK EXCERPTS FROM THE CITIZEN
