In yesterday’s edition of The Express, we published a story about the French National Assembly’s unanimous decision to repeal the country’s long-dormant Code Noir, or Black Code.

Enacted in 1685 under King Louis XIV, this decree was designed to regulate slavery across France’s colonial empire. The law, which quietly remained part of the legal code for 178 years after the country’s abolition of slavery, classified human beings as property and permitted them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.

In France and around the world, many were disturbed by the realization that such barbaric principles could still be embedded in the law.

Code Noir’s 60 articles “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” President Emmanuel Macron said last week.

“The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight,” Macron said. “It has become a form of offense.”

Sadly, Macron, like French presidents before him, stopped short of apologizing for that offense, but that’s another conversation.

While the repeal of an obsolete law in a country across the Atlantic may not mean much to the average American, the United States — though it follows a different legal tradition than France — has its own laws that fall into desuetude, or legal obsolescence.

The United States, with the exception of Louisiana, inherited from Britain the tradition of English common law, a system primarily built on judicial precedent and long-standing custom. In this system, courts interpret and apply laws over time, and some statutes may remain on the books long after they are no longer enforced or relevant.

While most of these laws are effectively meaningless, their continued presence has been criticized for their potential to undermine the integrity of the legal system. Critics argue that if laws are rarely or unevenly enforced, they can be selectively applied, challenging the principle that laws should apply equally and consistently to all.

Many of these laws would be considered absurd today — for example, Pennsylvania’s rules prohibiting the buying, selling or trading of motor vehicles on Sundays; banning mule riding on certain city streets; or making it illegal to sleep on top of a refrigerator outdoors. But some, like the state’s 163-year ban on fortune telling, still have real consequences.

In 2024, we published a SpotlightPA story involving Beck Lawrence, owner of The Serpent’s Key Shoppe & Sanctuary, an apothecary in Hanover, who is seeking to overturn that 19th-century law after local police suggested she could face jail time for offering tarot card readings.

The case highlights the peculiar scenarios that can emerge when a statute remains on the books long after the context that created it has faded.

“At first, I laughed, it’s so ludicrous, and I was like, classic PA would have this crazy law still on the books. I think we are united in the idea of how absurd this law is. And particularly now, I think we are very protective of our freedoms and our rights and to say and do what we want and have experiences,” Lawrence’s attorney Alexa Gervasi said.

While a ban on fortune telling may be relatively harmless, it raises broader questions about other lingering laws — some more controversial or rooted in darker periods of history — that remain embedded in statute.

We wonder, perhaps, if our lawmakers ought to consider some spring cleaning in case other, more insidious laws rear their ugly heads.