Yes, this is a real Ohio law. The specific prohibition against intoxicating fish exists in the Ohio Revised Code. The reasoning is presumably ecological, but the phrasing remains one of the most accidentally hilarious sentences in American jurisprudence.
Ohio is a landlocked state with no access to any whale-inhabited water. The law presumably applied to the Ohio River at some point, or was written by someone who was wildly optimistic about the state's geography. Either way, whales remain unaffected.
This law reportedly dates from an era when patent leather shoes were considered inappropriate because their highly reflective surface might give observers an unintended view of whatever was above the shoe. The law is widely cited though its current enforceability is unclear.
Ohio law includes a prohibition against mistreating anything 'of great importance' — which is so vague it could apply to nearly anything. A legal scholar might argue this is the most ambitious yet least useful sentence ever to appear in a law book.
Someone in Bexley, Ohio once apparently saw an opportunity at the intersection of gambling and outdoor plumbing. The city council disagreed. This law suggests the problem occurred at least once before legislation became necessary.
Columbus once had strict Sunday trading laws that specifically named various goods. Cornish pasties — a type of pastry — made the list. This law is historical and not actively enforced, but it remains delightful that pasties warranted specific legislative attention.
Bay Village, Ohio has specific restrictions on where bovines may be walked. Lake Road is apparently off-limits for cow-walking. No explanation is provided for why this particular street was identified as the primary cow-walking risk zone.
At some point in Ohio history, this was apparently not obvious enough to go unstated. Someone either rode on a taxi roof and created a legal gap, or a legislator had a vision of where things were heading and acted preemptively.
Ohio law technically considers running out of fuel on a state highway to be an offense. The practical logic is road safety — a stalled car is a hazard — but the enforcement mechanism of 'being more prepared' is philosophically interesting.
Toledo, Ohio passed specific anti-snake-throwing legislation, which raises questions this article cannot fully answer. What is clear is that this represents democracy working exactly as intended: a problem arose, and the people responded.
The specificity of this law is remarkable. Not just stripping generally — stripping in front of a man's picture. Framed photos of men in Ohio apparently required legal protection at some point in the city's history.
Similar to the state highway law, Youngstown doubled down with its own municipal ordinance against fuel depletion. Ohio clearly feels strongly about vehicular preparedness as a moral and legal obligation.
Ohio, like every US state, has accumulated decades and sometimes centuries of legislation. Laws written for specific 19th-century circumstances often remain on the books because repealing them requires legislative time and attention — resources typically devoted to more pressing matters than clarifying the legal status of fish inebriation.
Many of these laws also reflect genuine historical concerns that have since become obsolete — livestock in cities when urban farming was common, Sunday trading restrictions from religious law traditions, or public decency standards from different eras. The fish law, however, remains somewhat harder to contextualize.