A law is passed where the real target is a single person, most likely a personal enemy (or ally) of the lawmaker, but usually affects everyone. Often leads to a Forbidden Fruit or Streisand Effect.
In many cases, the law ends up screwing people over in completely unintended ways or long after the original lawmaker has died.
Often overlaps with Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! and Screw the Rules, I Make Them!. Compare Obvious Rule Patch and Rule-Breaker Rule-Namer. May involve an Original Position Fallacy if the lawmaker discovers the new law applies to them as well. Sometimes overlaps with Screwed by Their Own Rule.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- In The Arithmancer, after Hermione drops out of Hogwarts and starts taking tutoring from Slughorn, the Decree banning teachers from discussing topics other than those they are paid to teach with students would have kept Hermione and Septima from discussing Arithmancy. Hermione gets around that by paying Septima a Sickle a week to teach her Advanced Arithmancy, so Umbridge responds by banning teachers from teaching courses outside the Hogwarts curriculum. Hermione then starts "tutoring" Septima in Advanced Maths (which she is legally qualified to teach by this point), so Umbridge makes a rule that Hogwarts professors are not allowed to participate in educational programs during the school year. Then, after Harry likewise drops out, Umbridge simply makes a rule that students enrolled in non-Hogwarts programs are outright banned from the castle.
- In The Chronicles of Tanya the Fuehrer
, Tanya finds after returning to Berun that the treaty that ended the war was modified post-agreement by the Political Office now running Germania with an addendum banning non-adult mages and War College graduates from serving in the army until they are 21. Since Tanya is the only person in the entire army that fits either category, it's blatantly obvious to everyone that the Political Office deliberately added that clause to target her.
- In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, the rule concerning crocodiles (see below) needed to be re-envisioned in the case of Guild student Arachne Webber. Arachne, who in canon graduated to a diplomatic posting in Fourecks, asked permission to keep a pet spider as a companion animal, promising her tutors it would be confined to a suitable habitat. Her pet was misidentified as a "hitherto un-known species of tarantula, which will grow no larger than the size of her hand" and permission was given. time passed, and the Guild realised it was in fact a prime example of the Sloth-Eating Spider of Tezuma, which is capable of growing nine feet across from claw-tip to claw-tip.
- In Harry Potter fanfic Do Not Meddle In The Affairs Of Wizards, in the aftermath of Harry defeating Voldemort in Azkaban, Dumbledore convinces the Wizengamot to pass a law stating any student enrolled in a magical school must finish their education at the school where they started. Everyone with minimal ability to pay attention knows that it's aimed exclusively at keeping Harry from leaving the magical world*, and Harry himself lampshades it.
- A similar example features in the Harry Potter/Stargate-verse crossover "Harry Potter and the Ancient's Bane", when Harry is adopted by John Sheppard's family as an infant, contributing to circumstances that led to his brother Thomas being mistaken for the Boy-Who-Lived while James and Lily survived. After Thomas is left in a coma when Lily tried to get him to take the prophecy while James found Harry (now going by the name of Jason Sheppard), Dumbledore attempts to force 'Harry' (still unaware of Harry's new legal name) into a position where he can gain influence over the boy by convincing the Ministry to issue a decree that all British wizarding children must attend Hogwarts for their seventh year, regardless of their prior level of independent schooling. Unfortunately for Dumbledore, by the time he issues that decree not only has Jason relocated to Atlantis but James points out that Harry's adopted parents mean that he now has American citizenship, so he wouldn't have been covered by that law anyway.
- One of Jiraiya's first acts as Hokage in Son of the Sannin was to pass a law criminalizing discrimination based on someone's clan, an act that proved to be incredibly unpopular because it was specifically meant to protect Shisui, Itachi, and Sasuke from retaliation for their now dead clansmen's failed coup.
- In The Weaver Option, two articles of the Imperium-Neferten agreement involve how to cover any dealings both factions make in regards to the Queen of Blades and Trazyn the Infinite Collector.
Film - Animation
- Aladdin (1992, Disney): At the end the sultan repeals the law that forces the princess to marry a prince so that his daughter can get married to the commoner Aladdin.
Literature
- The Accursed Kings: The infamous "Salic law" that prevents a woman or descendants thereof from inheriting land is an integral plot point and causes much of the conflict in the latter part of the series. In reality, the law was all but forgotten by that point, with later jurists (and Shakespeare) retroactively using it to justify the exclusion of women from the line of succession.
- The law is dug up by Philippe V to prevent his "alleged" niece Jeanne (daughter of his deceased brother Louis X) from inheriting the thronenote , despite the dubious legality of expanding the ancestral law of a single region to all French territory, interpreting it as applying to the woman's line rather than just the woman, and the irony of Phillipe V only being on the throne thanks to female machinations. His mother-in-law Mahaut d'Artois had poisoned both Louis X and his posthumous son as revenge for imprisoning her daughters and niece and killing the latter. Philippe is named regent as the most obvious candidate for the job and is then crowned king after the baby dies. It is after this death that everything spirals out of control.
- Philippe V pulled of this gambit while his wife was pregnant and she ends up having a boy. However both he and the baby have died by the time of the next book and he leaves behind only daughters. The throne goes first to his inept brother Charles, who also dies without male issue, then to their cousin Philippe of Valois as the next male line descendant.
- After Phillipe of Valois becomes king, Salic Law becomes a single target law to keep his first cousin once removed Edward III of England off of the throne. Edward III is, at that point, the only surviving grandson of the previous king Philippe IV. His mother Isabella (sister of the three kings who died in quick succession) argues that a grandson via woman trumps a nephew from the male line. While he proves himself to be extraordinarily competent from a very young age, the French nobility are not keen on their monarch being English. The conflicting claim between the two men ends up spiraling into The Hundred Years War.
- The Berenstain Bears Big Chapter Books: Brought up in The Berenstain Bears and the Dress Code.
- When Vice-Principal Grizzmeyer comes up with the school dress code, one of the rules is "No Batbear capes". It's not pointed out at the time, but that rule is pretty clearly aimed at Too-Tall, the only cub wearing one.
- While the cubs are discussing the dress code, Ferdy says at least the dress code is fair, because it's aimed at banning any style of rad clothes. Trudy Brunowitz points out that Ferdy wouldn't be saying that if knickers were on the banned list, and when he says he would because such a ban would be meant for everyone, she retorts that no, it'd clearly be aimed at him — he's the only cub in the school that wears them. Ferdy's reaction to this is not shown.
- At the finale of The Black Magician Trilogy, the Wizarding School revises its laws to make the protagonist Sonea the one exception to the ban on Black Magic, at least until she retires and appoints a successor as Black Mage. It's done in part to reward her for saving the country and in part to secure a uniquely powerful asset — especially since the school's rivals have been exposed as extraordinarily powerful black magic practitioners.
- Discworld: The Assassin's Guild School went through this on two separate occasions, with an initial rule—one banning the keeping of pet crocodiles, the other enforcing gender segregation in the dormitories—that then kept having to be amended to cover various forms of Rules Lawyering by individual pupils. In the latter instance there was an extreme case where the notation "A girl is defined as a young person of the female persuasion" was immediately followed by the rule "No matter how persuaded he feels, Jelks Minor in Form IV is a boy."
- Donkeys Can't Sleep in Bathtubs and Other Crazy Laws: The book itself is mainly a list of outright bizarre laws, but the introduction includes an explanation for one law that was blatantly an example of this — a couple in New York state had hung a clothesline in their front yard and filled it with old clothes, as a way of protesting high taxes, showing the taxes were making them poor. The city fathers didn't like this and responded by passing a law requiring that people have a license to have a clothesline in their front yard (the excuse being that it was to ensure that the city was kept looking tidy), and blocked the couple's attempt to get said license.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: After Harry gives an interview to the fringe magazine The Quibbler revealing Voldemort's return, Umbridge puts out a blanket ban on the magazine as part of her ongoing campaign to discredit Harry. Naturally, this ensures that everyone in Hogwarts will try to get their hands on it to know why it was banned (and Luna Lovegood, the editor's Cloudcuckoolander daughter, is amazed at how popular the magazine has gotten).
- Labyrinths of Echo: Juffin Hally, the chief of the Secret Investigations, is forbidden from gambling in public spaces anywhere in the United Kingdom by a royal decree. This is because Juffin was Born Lucky and became infamous as a card-sharp soon after he moved to the capital, so the law was needed to protect public peace. He doesn't mind at all, however, since being singled out by the king himself like that greatly boosted his ego, and nobody wanted to play against him anymore, anyway.
- In the A Series of Unfortunate Events book "The Bad Beginning or Orphans", the narrator claims that there's a town that has a law that forbids him from entering it.
- Inverted in Stardoc. Cherijo's genetic father Dr. Joseph Grey Veil engineered the passage of an Earth law banning genetic engineering research and declaring any human results to be legally nonsentient. This was meant to eliminate potential competition to his own research; he himself had the clout to invoke Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! if caught.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: In "Knives", one of Londo's old friends, Urza Jaddo, comes to him for help when the Centaurum (the Centauri legislature) is debating a bill of attainder declaring him a traitor. Londo goes to his ally Lord Refa to kill the bill... but Urza refuses Refa's aid since it was Refa's idea in the first place. Instead he challenges Londo to a Duel to the Death, planning to throw the fight so that under Centauri law Londo's family will be forced to absorb Urza's, protecting them.
- In the Happy Days episode "The Physical", Sgt. Beckler says that everyone in jackets must move to the end of the line as revenge for Fonzie calling him "Belcher" because Fonzie is the only one in a jacket. He moves to the front end of the line.
Myths & Religion
- The Bible:
- King Herod supposedly ordered the mass execution of male Hebrew infants due to a prophecy about the birth of the King of the Jews, fearing he might be dethroned. Thanks to divine intervention, Jesus's family fled so all babies but Jesus were killed.
- Haman, the main antagonist of the Book of Esther, continuously manipulates king Xerxes into oppressing the Jewish people solely to get back at Mordecai, who had refused to bow down to him on religious grounds. It's turned against him when Xerxes asks Haman how to reward a man who'd performed a great service to the king. Thinking he's the one, Haman suggests a massive parade, only for Xerxes to agree and state that Mordecai will be thus rewarded for foiling a regicide plot.
- In the Book of Daniel, the courtiers are envious of the prophet Daniel's prosperity and know that he prays to the Lord every day. They have King Darius decree that prayers can only be said to himself, on pain of death, knowing that the only person who won't obey it is Daniel. Once it ends up only affecting Daniel (who was the king's chief advisor and best friend), Darius becomes distraught, but can't find a way to repeal the law, or even pardon him. He sentences Daniel to be devoured by lions, who escapes unscathed by Divine Intervention. The King then makes Judaism the state religion and has his courtiers fed to the lions instead.
Webcomics
- Nodwick: One strip has the main characters hired by a town to get rid of an Obviously Evil sorcerer that just moved in. They're unable to do so because it turns out that the sorcerer has been very careful to avoid breaking any laws while in town, which they report to the town leaders. They then arrest the sorcerer for breaking the town's newest law: looking evil without a license.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The Ten Commandments were actually entirely directed at one (1) guy named Dave.
Moses: Lord! Dave's at it again! He told me he wasn't doing anything this Sabbath, but the truth is he was murdering his parents, then using a stolen idol that he worships as a sex-toy to cheat on his wife with his neighbor's sexier wife while shouting "Goddamn!"
- In Shortpacked!, Robin garners a huge amount of public support when she campaigns for a law that would force two of her male coworkers to fight in a giant vat of pudding.
- Something*Positive has a city official get humiliated when his attempt to hijack Mike's Real Life Superhero persona for PR purposes backfires in public. When next seen he's trying to pass a law to ban those activities (and making no effort to disguise that it's solely to get back at Mike, calling it the "Who's laughing now, jerk" ordinance).
Western Animation
- Played for Laughs in the Family Guy episode "Lois Kills Stewie" where one of the ridiculous new laws Stewie makes is that whoever sees Peter Griffin must throw apples at him.
Peter: That's okay, Chris. You're a good boy, following the law. But you, Meg, you're going to jail...
- King: In "Never Be Nice to a Pubrick", after seeing everyone blaming the titular creature for things it couldn't possibly have any control over, Russell passes a law to get people to stop blaming it for things. He later learns that the Pubrick has to be blamed for things all the times, or else it will grow into a violent monster.
- The Legend of Korra has the sport of pro-bending, consisting of three-person teams made up of one Firebender, one Earthbender, and one Waterbender. The game has to be patched when the Avatar unexpectedly joins a team, being "fouled" when she Earthbends on the court despite being the team's designated Waterbender. The officials confer and decide on a new rule: players can only bend the element that matches their role on the team, which never had to be a rule before since there's only one living Avatar at a time and no one else can bend multiple elements.
- Played for Laughs in the first Robot Chicken DC Comics Special: Lex Luthor issues a new rule to the Legion of Doom, banning them from gifting each other with explosive toys during "Secret Santa". Toyman immediately complains, pointing out that he's literally the only one affected by that rule.
Real Life
- A bill of attainder is legislation declaring a person or persons guilty of a crime and punishing them, often without a trial. The US Constitution bans this as well as ex post facto laws; in fact, two separate clauses in Article I (specifically, in Sections 9 and 10) prohibit them to both the federal government and the states.
- More common and far more benign than bills of attenders are private bills, sometimes also called personal bills, by which the legislature grants some individual a status or special exemption from general laws.
- In early modern Britain (until the 20th century) there were all kinds of things where individuals—generally rich and powerful ones—could get Parliament to pass special bills to get them out of a jam; the big ones were divorces and breaking of entails. These fell out of use after the establishment of modern divorce laws (over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries) and the abolition of entail (by the Law of Property Act 1925), respectively. Today, ironically, the most common use of personal bills in the UK is granting exemptions to the marriage laws (i.e., allowing people who would normally be barred from marrying to do so).
- Another historically common use of private bills—both in the United Kingdom and the United States—was granting citizenship or other immigration status to prominent foreigners. Indeed, until the establishment of a regular procedure for naturalisation in 1840, there was no regular way for non-Britons to become British subjects without an Act of Parliament. (Famously, George Frederic Handel was naturalised by Act of Parliament in 1727, along with three other prominent Germans living in England.) Oddly, these days it's the United States that uses private bills for immigration purposes, though usually to get around technical requirements in the notoriously byzantine U.S. immigration and naturalization process rather than proclaiming "this guy is now a citizen" directly.
- In early modern Britain (until the 20th century) there were all kinds of things where individuals—generally rich and powerful ones—could get Parliament to pass special bills to get them out of a jam; the big ones were divorces and breaking of entails
- Another more benign UK example is the Peerage Act 1963, whose main provision was to allow hereditary peers to "disclaim" their titles, the title then becoming dormant during their lifetime but passing to their heir as normal on their death. This was almost entirely to help the politician Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, 2nd Viscount Stansgate, who wanted to continue to sit in the House of Commons after he inherited his title (as at the time it had become a convention that members of the House of Lords, who had not achieved their positions by election, should not become government ministers, and also because holding a peerage was in conflict with his very left-wing political principles). It was then almost immediately also used by one of Benn's political opponents, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home, to disclaim his own titles to allow him to sit in the Commons and respect the convention that the Prime Minister must sit in the Lower House.note
- Sections 74AA and 74AB of the Corrections Act 1986 in Victoria significantly restrict the ability of the parole board to grant parole to Julian Knight or Craig Minogue. The Parole Board can only consider their parole cases if and only if they asked for it (rather than automatically due to the amount of jail time), and they're dying or otherwise so incapacitated that they are incapable of committing a crime.
- In 1995, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) filed H.R. 1855, which aimed to remove jurisdiction from District of Columbia courts in some cases of child custody disputes; this bill was laser-tailored to apply to the Hilary Foretich custody case (indeed, it was nicknamed the "Elizabeth Morgan Act", from her mother) and her father successfully contested it as a bill of attainder.
- In 1938, Edward VIII of the United Kingdom declared his intent to abdicate. Because the Act of Settlement defines the monarch to be the most senior descendant of Sophia of Hanover unless otherwise disqualified, the Parliament (who wanted him to go due to his Nazi sympathies) passed His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936, for the sole purpose of stating Edward VIII's Instrument of Abdication—and only that document—means Edward VIII wrote himself out of the line of succession.
- In 2016, then Japanese Emperor Akihito publicly impliednote that he, at the age of 85, was too old and frail for a constitutional monarch and would like to abdicate in favour of his son Naruhito. Since Japanese law intentionally left out the possibility for abdication, owing to a history of emperors abdicating to become Just the First Citizen, the Japanese Diet passed Imperial Household Law (Special Provisions for Imperial Abdication) Act, whose preamble specifically mentions Akihito (as "His current Imperial Majesty"), and stated the law would be nullified if Akihito did not abdicate three years after its passing (June 16, 2017), or died during the same period. Akihito formally abdicated on April 30, 2019.
- The NHL has several rules they put in place specifically to curb a single player's antics. For instance, Marty McSorley intentionally taking penalties while on a power play to create a 4-on-4 situation, which the Edmonton Oilers, featuring Wayne Gretzky, would capitalize on the extra space of to score a lot of goals was patched around with the concept of "Incidental penalties". Some of these rules are named after their players or after former beneficiaries; for instance, the previous example is now called "The Gretzky Rule".
- Vidkun Quisling, the real-life Trope Namer for The Quisling, was so hated by Norwegians for his trope-naming antics (he was a Norwegian fascist politician who collaborated with the Nazis after their invasion of Norway and was made leader of a Nazi puppet government) that after Norway was liberated and the Norwegian government realized they couldn't execute him because capital punishment was illegal in Norway, they re-instated the death penalty just long enough to subject Quisling to it, then banned it again afterwards.
- When the high-ranking former Nazi Adolf Eichmann was tried for crimes against humanity in Israel, no Israeli lawyer was willing to defend him for obvious reasons. So that he could be legally represented by German defense counsel, the Israeli government passed a law stating that lawyers with foreign qualifications would be permitted to appear in Israeli courts, but only when defending a person who might receive the death sentence if convicted (the death sentence under Israeli law at the time being reserved for crimes so extreme that nobody other than Eichmann could be expected to be sentenced to death in the foreseeable future).
- The Amstrad CPC 464 (a British-made computer from the 1980s) proved so popular in Spain that a law was passed increasing taxes on the importing of 64-kb computers to help the sales of Spanish-made computers. Amstrad got around it by selling the CPC 472, a special version of the computer with 8 extra kilobytes of memory (except the extra 8 kb weren't connected to the computer, just sold with it).
- This trope is sometimes exploited in countries with high levels of corruption to let dictators or shady politicians subtly reward and enrich their cronies. A law will be passed authorizing the government to procure some piece of equipment—usually military hardware—that meets a particular set of specifications. But those requirements will be written so specifically that exactly one product in existence can possibly meet all of them, and conveniently the sole company that produces it just so happens to be owned by someone who supports or donates to the politician who introduced the law. Sometimes the law even goes so far as to state precisely the price the government would be willing to pay for such a piece of equipment. This will of course be high enough that the company (and its owner) will make a tidy (and completely legal) profit. Scams like this is why some countries have laws mandating a competition process for military procurement, even when a ready-made solution already exists.
- Philip Marc was a sheriff under King John of England, thought to be a source of inspiration for the Sheriff of Nottingham, and so unpopular he's specifically named in the Magna Carta as being evicted from his office (along with several other people and families).
"Item 50. We will entirely remove from their bailiwicks, the relations of Gerard of Athee (so that in future they shall have no bailiwick in England); namely, Engelard of Cigogné, Peter, Guy, and Andrew of Chanceaux, Guy of Cigogné, Geoffrey of Martigny with his brothers, Philip Mark with his brothers and his nephew Geoffrey, and the whole brood of the same."
- The Salic law in France prohibiting women from inheriting the throne was agreed upon by the Estates General in 1317 with the goal to eliminate a specific candidate to the throne of late Louis X, Joan of Navarra, because there were serious doubts that she was his legitimate daughter. As a consequence, through the next several centuries, Europe was being ravaged by wars of succession due to the fact that most of European monarchies were related (thus were often candidates to each other's thrones) but only some of them recognized the Salic law.
- Throughout the 2020s, the governor of Utah has refused to pass laws that target transgender student athletes, on the grounds that there are only about four such people in the entire state, only one of whom competes in girls' sports.
- The original 1954 version of The Comics Code stated that "No comics magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title," along with other rules limiting the use of the word "crime." It is believed that these rules were implemented with the intent of specifically targeting EC Comics, who published violent horror and crime comics and were especially disliked by the Moral Guardians of the time.
- Inverted by the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution. This amendment established term limits for presidents but includes a Grandfather Clause exempting the president at the time the amendment was proposed (i.e. Harry S. Truman) and allowing him to run for reelection beyond these limits should he so choose. He actually did attempt to take advantage of this, running in New Hampshire's state primary (the first one of the year), but withdrew as his party's candidate after losing badly.
- The standing order of the Bundestag limits joint parliamentary groups to these German parties which, "due to aligned political goals, do not compete with one another in any state". Meaning both parties somehow need to cross the 5% threshold on their own (or win each 3 constituencies) without competing nation-wide limiting it to just the almost-Germany-wide CDU and the CSU, which is so strong in Bavaria that it does not have to worry about either of the thresholds.