| why not treat yourself to a crime spree this summer? It's an easy and affordable way to have fun without consequences, as long as you choose your violations carefully. Avoid robbery or assault. Try firing a gun into a cave, selling bootleg dentures, sending a scab through the mail or cutting a dollar bill in half: all federal crimes for which you can technically be punished but probably won't be, as Mike Chase's "How to Become a Federal Criminal" temptingly explains. Chase is a white-collar criminal defense lawyer by day and a scholar of frivolous laws by night. He practices in Connecticut and runs the Twitter account @CrimeADay, where he posts snippets from his reading of the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations, which together list the torrent of guidelines that govern, in theory, the lives of American citizens. "How to Become a Federal Criminal" is an expansion on the tweets. Here we learn that you can't keep a walrus as a pet, wear a postal worker's uniform if you're not a postal worker, even on Halloween, or use explosives to catch fish in a national park. We all understand that the law is imperfectly (and often ruinously) enforced, but Chase demonstrates that it is also, in many cases, absurdly conceived. The material here can be roughly divided into three categories of "funny." The first includes laws that are clearly the result of greed-induced lobbying - laws that draw pathetically banal distinctions, like the one that prohibits selling a 10-inch frozen cherry tart because (pay attention!) any freezer-bound cherry tartlike item over four inches in diameter is legally considered a "frozen cherry pie." Actual people devoted months or years of their lives focusing the noble instrument of the law on frozen pastry, and Chase suggests they deserve to be ridiculed for it. Other laws are funny because they're plainly reactive - drawn up, that is, in response to some travesty of behavior or perversion of the social contract. This includes the rule against feeding an unskinned wolverine to your dog in an Alaskan national park or the one that requires sprayable cheese to carry a warning label instructing users not to spray it in their eyes. The federal register is crammed with implications of low human comedy spelled out in exquisitely bloodless prose. A third category of funniness is a question of scale. If you ever wondered why all bacon packages feature a transparent window of the bacon within, it's because the law mandates that consumers must be able to see at least 70 percent of a "representative slice" through the packaging. If you stumble upon noncompliant bacon in the supermarket, you should definitely report it. The fact that something as piddling as a bacon sneak preview is a matter of federal concern is funny for the same reason it's funny to see a monkey dressed in a suit. I should offer a disclaimer here. I normally approach Twitter-spawned book deals the way I approach novelizations of movies, which is to say: not at all, thanks! It's not snobbishness, it's pattern-recognition. Jamming a bunch of Tweets together and calling it a book is like serving a thousand canapés and calling it a meal. The forms do not automatically, or even usually, translate. But when it comes to goofy legislation, the amplification beyond Tweet length actually benefits the comedy because context and extrapolation are the funniest parts. What the truly fatuous laws underscore is how unthinkingly we rely on a mesh of norms to keep us out of trouble. A robust but unavoidably fluid understanding of relative priorities (known as prosecutorial discretion) means that drug lords and serial killers are fingered more readily than guys who sell defectively stapled matchbooks, but matchbook man still lives with the shadow of punishment over his head, even if he believes himself faultless: The law doesn't usually require a person to know that an act is illegal for him to be charged and convicted of it. There's also an element of public service in play here. Somebody with credentials has combed through a mountain of boring literature, highlighted all the ticklish parts and served them up for appreciation. This is an excellent book for people who like to start sentences with "Did you know that ..." or people who are titillated by the idea of a whole section called "Other Stamp Crimes." It also provides a primer on how to read federal statutes, which is useful if you ever wondered what meant. (It designates a particular section of a document, which is essential when it comes to organizing lengthy tomes of legal code. But now that you have a handle on ?, it's easy to think of recreational applications: aggressive emails, house rules for guests at your apartment and so on.) Paging through the mountain of puzzling regulations that Chase has collected, it's impossible not to toy with an existential question: If a law is unenforceable, is it really a crime to break it? Let's say you find yourself exploring one of America's glorious national parks this summer, traipsing through a meadow of wild strawberries under a buttery orb of sun when you stumble upon a valley of sweetly grazing bison. Summer is rutting season. Let's say one of the bison keeps throwing meaningful looks at a hot female bison grazing nearby. You want so bad to make a crack about the timeless drama unfolding before you, but it's a federal crime to tease a wild animal in a national park, and the consequence is up to six months in prison and a fine. Do you give the bison a fond little roast? That's between you and your conscience. It's illeged to wear a posted worker's uniform if you eiren't one. Even on Hedloween. MOLLY young is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the co-author, with Joana Avillez, of "D-C-T." |
