Posted September 15, 2022
dtgreene: Not when the thing being made illegal is actually impossible. (I'm pretty sure there are laws like that in the books somewhere.)
amok: before I posted I tried to think about a law which it is impossible to break, and I cannot think of any. the reason for this, I assume, is that we do not need laws against impossible actions. we only need laws against possible actions. happy to be proven wrong, off course, I would really like to know laws against impossible actions. There's certainly laws that are unreasonable or downright impossible not to break (when the complexity of legal systems that ensure people are always in a double bind, or laws that are broad enough to be applied on everyday life - these systems usually still function because there's some common sense in the use, function and application of laws, but in dictatorships they serve the power by allowing a suddenly arbitrarily rigid interpretation of them to be used against any targeted citizen at any point). And witchcraft laws can often be used as such, as witch trials sare designed to make it impossible to disprove that you didn't do the impossible thing you're accused of. But given that said thing is impossible, you could also, legally, argue that all which trials should have ended in dismissals, given that the accusation is impossible.
These are historical examples, but there's certainly vestigial laws of that ilk. And in several regions of the world, where witchcraft is still part of common everyday anxieties, such laws still apply (customary or judicial). Also laws live long, there's certainly many forgotten laws that have become impossible to break simply due to the vanishing of the technologies or practices they pertain to.
It would take a bit of digging, but these are the directions likely to offer examples.