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Handful of weird TN laws get repealed every year

There are plenty of old, strange or outdated laws on the Tennessee books.

We have all heard of them - those strange, often outdated or just plain weird laws that make you think, "really?"

Within the thousands of laws in the state of Tennessee, some of them make you do a double take.

"You're always going to hear ideas or things presented that will make you say, what did he just say?" said state Rep. Rick Staples, D-Knoxville.

Take, for example, Article 9 Section 3 of the Tennessee Constitution. It reads, "any person who shall fight a duel ... shall be deprived of the right to hold any office."

"How many duels have you seen recently? They just don't do that anymore," said Judge Gary Wade, the former Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court and current Dean of the Lincoln Memorial University Law School. "No more Aaron Burrs and Alexander Hamiltons walking around and having a gentlemanly duel is not something you're going to see in the near future."

Or how about section two of that same article. It reads that, "no person who denies the being of God ... shall hold any office in the civil department of this state."

"Which one of our legislators would want to be the sponsor of a law that repealed that?" said Wade. "It would certainly not be a popular move in the Bible belt here in Tennessee."

Every year, the Office of the Repealer within the Tennessee General Assembly gets a handful of requests from citizens around the state asking them to repeal laws.

They review the submissions based on a law being anachronistic, obsolete, defective, duplicative, contradictory, unnecessary or incomprehensible.

"Through that office, we've constantly been repealing old laws that no longer apply just so they're not sitting out there on the books anymore," state Rep. Eddie Smith, R-Knoxville, said. "Any citizen that finds a law that they think needs to be repealed or looked at, they can actually email the office of the repealer and they will take a look at that."

MORE INFORMATION: Tennessee Office of the Repealer

In 2016, the office of the repealer received three requests for a law to be repealed but only recommended one statute be deleted.

In 2015, they received five requests and in 2014 there were nine.

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