Rules Lawyer

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R.I.P. Gary Gygax (1938-2008)

"They're not loopholes! They're special rules for the people who go to the effort of finding them!" —Brian Van Hoose, Knights of the Dinner Table

Rules Lawyers come in different flavors; from Lawful Evil to Lawful Good, although the term usually carries a negative connotation. What both versions have in common is a nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of every single aspect of the rules within the game system. The difference between the two is largely down to attitude and how it effects the overall game. Lawful Evil Rules Lawyers manipulates the rules to give themselves advantages even if it ruins the game for everyone else, while Lawful Good Rules Lawyers play by the rules even if that puts them at a disadvantage, and generally try to use the rules to make things more fun for everyone.

The Lawful Evil Rules Lawyer is a particularly annoying kind of player who believes that because he can find a rule about some action in one of the manuals, the Game Master is bound to allow him to take that action, even if it doesn't make sense, or would screw with what's going on. He's convinced that, with the power of the rules, he can outmaneuver the GM and get what he wants. He will attempt to employ every loophole, every odd circumstance, and every footnote he can. Expect the Rules Lawyer to have pored over most of the manuals, even those that players aren't supposed to read. And most annoyingly, he seems to remember only the parts that support whatever he's doing at that moment, intentionally ignoring whatever doesn't support his own case. (And insists on Exact Words.)

Usually, the first rule the Rules Lawyer conveniently "forgets" while making his arguments is Rule Zero: that the GM is always right. Squashing him with this early is the best bet; attempting to argue about rules with him only encourages his behavior. If invoked, he might dare to argue that Rule Zero is an unwritten rule, despite it being a foundation of good play.

One of the basic tactics of Munchkins everywhere, and part of the reason some games in fact have a Metagame. They are among the few people who Read the Fine Print. See My Rule Fu Is Stronger Than Yours for the argument that is going to happen with the GM at some point. If a rule in a book ever seems to be written rather verbosely, or explain things that seem like common sense, it's the writers trying to stop these guys.

However, this trope does come in a positive variant referred to as the Lawful Good Rules Lawyer: they always stick to the rules, no matter how bad it might be for them personally. And they'll point out exactly the proper rules that state that, no, they didn't escape the deathtrap, they died.

Conversely, in a tabletop setting, the rules are the Player Characters' primary means of interacting with the world, and if a GM is constantly changing the rules mid-game, the players cannot play. Gaming groups must, by necessity, be a mutually policing force. Sometimes a Rules Lawyer is necessary when the GM is repeatedly sending waves and waves of homebrewed mooks who are immune to everything except the powers of that one super duper archmage the GM has been writing a novel about for the last seven years and if you try to fight them without the archmage GMPC, you die. No save.

In this instance, the Rules Lawyer is one check against GM misbehavior, as in a healthy gaming group, the GM is answerable to the players as much as the players are answerable to the GM, because it is everybody's game.

A Lawful Good Rules Lawyer can also be a valuable thing to have in your gaming group if one or more of the players in your gaming group cheats or doesn't RTFM. Even when the rest of the group is on the level, the fact that a Rules Lawyer will, by definition, know all of the rules can make them useful for a gaming group.

Examples of Rules Lawyer include:

Anime and Manga

• Light Yagami from Death Note is constantly exploiting the rules of the Death Notes in obscure and bizarre ways to accomplish his goals. Arguably, the entire series is about Rules Lawyering.
• Lelouch vi Britannia from Code Geass uses his Geass powers in similar ways (in season 1), although not as extreme as Light. Best example would be when he used his Geass on himself to alter his own memories, so the mind-reader he was fighting wouldn't grasp Lelouch's real plan until it was too late.
  • Though most of what Lelouch does is simply creative (or sometimes desperate) use of his ability. A more straightforward example would be Suzaku learning to use his geass ("Live!") to give himself amazing battle prowess, by convincing himself his life was constantly in danger of ending at every second if he wasn't the greatest Knightmare pilot in the world.

Card Games

• Parodied (naturally) in the card game Munchkin with the card Invoke Obscure Rules. This card has been translated as Regelneuker in the Dutch version, which is actually the Dutch word for a Rules Lawyer and literally translates as "rule fucker."
  • It is completely legal to play Go Up A Level cards on your opponents while they are facing monsters that have a "Will not pursue under level X" restriction.
  • Or, after several cards have been played to jump to a level that can actually kill the enemy in question, dumping a "Friendly" on it. No treasure, no fight, no level up.
  • If you fail to defeat/run away from the Orcs, you lose levels equal to the number you roll on a die, unless it's a one or a two, in which case you die. However, if you are "unlucky" enough to have a Chicken-on-your-Head (subtract one from all die rolls) you can actually roll a zero, which is neither a one or a two so you don't die, and you lose zero levels.
  • In Munchkin Cthulhu, the Cultist class gets a bonus for each other Cultist in play. It's possible to multiclass using Super Munchkin and become a Cultist Cultist, which gives you a +4 bonus for being yourself. Twice.
  • One card even specifies 'reveal your hand' as 'your cards, not the thing at the end of your arm'.
    • The sad thing is that such rules are actually necessary, as sometimes playing a game making fun of munchkins and rule lawyers is a good way to find out who in your group is an earnest and dedicated one for real.
• Similarly to Munchkin, much of the point of Magic: The Gathering is to find unusual ways to twist the rules to win. While any Game Breaker will eventually be banned, Magic is notably different from roleplaying games like D&D because there is no "rule zero" enforcing the spirit of the rules or prohibiting things that don't make sense according to the game's story. If you can figure out a legitimate loophole in the letter of the rules, there's nothing to prevent you from exploiting it until the rules are officially changed.
  • Magic tournament judges can impose penalties on players who push their rules lawyering too far if they deem to be disruptive to the tournament or as stalling to run out the clock. Over the years the tournament rules have evolved a lot to give judges a lot of leeway when handling stuff like this.
    • A famous example of a judge cracking down on rules lawyers occurred at French Nationals when a few players discovered that the DCI (ruling body of sanctioned tournament Magic) made a mistake when posting updated card wordings on their webpage. One card was posted with an old, obsolete wording which allowed for a obscenely powerful combo. Since the wording on the webpage was considered to supersede any other wording the players tried to used it in the tournament. The Head Judge disallowed the combo and when some of the players played it anyway, he expelled them from the tournament. The DCI backed him on it and upheld the penalties.
  • Famous example: Player casts a spell with the effect "Target player loses the game," then points at a completely different table and says "That guy." The judge deemed this legal, as (at the time) there was no specific rule saying that a spell cannot target something in a completely different game.
  • One that was patched within a couple days of discovery: a player used an existing ruling on the Time Vault card to argue that mana generation cards could be used between turns as well as during them. A particular card had the limitation that it could not be used more than once during a single turn. Hello, infinite mana (with a card combo to prevent infinite damage from mana burn.)
  • Chaos Orb is a rather bizarre card that lends itself to rather bizarre interpretations of the rules—its effect is that you flip it up in the air, and it destroys any cards it lands on. One quick glance at the errata gives you an idea of the headaches it has caused but the example has to be the player who ripped the card into pieces and then scattered it over his opponent's cards.
    • This incident was immortalized in the Chaos Confetti card which demands that Chaos Confetti be used in this exact manner. Clearly, this is a single-use card.
  • In late 2011, a tournament rules document was revised to no longer penalize players for missing their own beneficial triggered abilities. The accompanying caveat was that even if you remembered the ability, you could choose to ignore it, and your opponent couldn't point it out and force you to resolve it either. This revision was quickly yanked when people realized that you could play the card Transcendence and refuse to ever gain life (a "beneficial ability"), making you effectively unkillable by damage.
• Yugioh has a few ways of exploiting its very odd rules. For example, there's a card that requires you to discard a monster from your hand to summon it. Said card can discard itself to summon itself.
  • There's also the Synchro Monster 'Colossal Fighter' which, when destroyed, can special summon a warrior-type monster from either player's Graveyard. Since 'Colossal Fighter' activates this effect while itself is in the graveyard, it can actually summon itself back onto the field.
• Ever played the Star Wars Customizable Card Game? You need to be a Rules Lawyer basically. Make sure to have a calculator ready if someone plays Brainiac.

Comic Books

• The ultimate Comic Book Rules Lawyer is Brian Van Hoose of Knights of the Dinner Table, who is constantly digging up obscure rules to frustrate BA's best-laid plans.

Film

• In the opening scene of The Wild Hunt, Argyle and Bjorn's duel devolves into a argument over LARP rules.
• Tin Cup: Roy, the hero, makes a bet with his smarmy jackass of an antagonist: the guy who hits a golf ball the furthest wins. Roy nails his shot, hitting it about 225 yards down the driving range. The antagonist smiles, turns around and hits the ball out of the course, down a long asphalt road. It's still bouncing when the scene ends.
• Heimdall in Thor is Asgard's resident badass Rules Lawyer.

Literature

• Subverted in the Robert A. Heinlein novel Space Cadet, where the one of the heroes early in the story attempts to exploit military regulations to make it too inconvenient for his superiors to give him orders he does not like. He is soon warned about what happens to "space lawyers."
• An entire alien race in Tom Holt's Falling Sideways. They managed to rip a gargantuan loophole in Thou Shalt Not Kill.
• There is a good Vogon in the sixth The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He doesn't want to cause Earthshattering Kabooms, but objecting on moral grounds on a Vogon ship is a good way to get Thrown Out the Airlock. He eventually decided that Rules Lawyering is a good way to obstruct the malicious Obstructive Bureaucrats without suspicion.
• In the short story And Then There Were None, a ship from Earth lands on a remote planet that has been out of contract for centuries and starts trying to reopen contact with the inhabitants. They have a very hard time understanding the native Gands, but since they're not hostile by the regulations definition, the men can't legally be denied leave. Problem is, so many like the planet they go AWOL. Too many Space Lawyers on his crew know the regs by heart, so despite much attempted wrangling to make the natives fit the definition of hostile, they fail, but find that leave can be postponed continually - thought it only makes the crew more mutinous.
• The Supernatural Community in The Dresden Files is rife with this kind of thing. Being a proficient Rules Lawyer is considered a necessary skill when it comes to keeping your head on your shoulders.
  • To clarify, most supernatural creatures hold to the old-world rules of hospitality... but are also well-acquainted with the use of the Exact Words interpretation of those rules. This sometimes leads to a sort of Failure Is the Only Option situation, where you can wrangle one of these creatures into an agreement to behave itself... but it will be deeply offended that you did so and didn't take it at its original word. So you know that it won't kill you until the terms of the promise runs out... but it will eagerly do so at any point in the rest of your life.
  • Also, the fae are an entire race of rules lawyers. They're magically bound not to tell a lie... and thus only a complete idiot would trust anything they say, since 99.99% of them bend their entire will to figuring out how to avoid telling the truth without technically lying.
• A great deal of the plot of Njál's Saga revolves around playing with the legal code of the Icelandic Commonwealth, not always successfully. Njál is best at this, but many of the other lawyers in the saga are pretty good at manipulating the law as well. At a moment of climax in the saga, the wily Eyjolf gets the entire prosecution of the burners thrown out of court on a technicality, which angers Thorhall so much that he strides into the courtroom with a spear and ganks the first guy he sees. The biggest battle in the saga breaks out immediately after, which is all the more dramatic given that violence was taboo at the Althing.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, the only person who has the authority to countermand an order given to a Count's Armsman is the Emperor. So when Cordelia needs to leave Tanery Base to rescue her son from Vordarian, the fact that the Armsman seconded to her is under orders to stay there is a problem. Then Bothari explains that when the Count's heir seconded him to her, he says to obey her orders as if they were his own. And since Aral Vorkosigan was the Imperial Regent (Even if he wasn't thinking of himself in that position when giving the order), that meant Cordelia has the legal authority of the Emperor as far as Bothari is concerned.

Live-Action TV

• As below in Real Life, Model UNs on TV tend to play with this as well:
  • On Community, Asian Annie tries to win by default, rejecting an offer of peace from her opponent. The moderator reminds her that the real UN appreciates impractical gestures, handing the victory to the study group.
• In the Bubble Boy episode of Seinfeld, George and the Bubble Boy are playing Trivial Pursuit, when George draws a card with a misprint. The question is "Who invaded Spain in the 8th century?" The misprinted card reads "The Moops". George, eager to see his opponent miss for a change, insists that the Bubble Boy's answer of "Moors" is incorrect, leading to hilarity ensuing.
• In The Phil Silvers Show, Sgt. Bilko is a master of the obscure rule. He's apparently memorized all the army regulations, dating back to the Spanish-American war. He has no interest in keeping the rules, but finds it useful to be able to use them against his opponents.
• This was originally how the Defiant got its cloaking device on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The treaty between the Federation and the Romulan Empire specified that the Federation was not allowed to develop or use cloaking technology. With the threat of the Dominion looming, the Federation successfully rules lawyered to the Romulans that this treaty only applied to the Alpha Quadrant... meaning the Defiant was allowed to cloak inside the Gamma Quadrant on the other side of the Bajoran Wormhole.
  • Another Star Trek example: Captain Picard is dealing with the Sheliak, a species of extremely unyielding, extremely arrogant aliens that want to abide by the letter of an incredibly long and complicated treaty they made with the Federation, using it as a bludgeon to refuse any attempts at diplomacy or delaying their three day timetable for colonizing a planet that needs to be evacuated of human settlers. Picard finds a clause in the contract that allows him to choose a neutral third party representative to arbitrate any contract disputes... and chooses a race that will be in hibernation for the next six months. The Sheliak suddenly develop a new interest in the malleability of the treaty.
  • And from the original series: Kirk encounters a race of primitive people that have had aliens interfere with them by selling one faction on their planet flintlock rifles. Kirk is bound by the Prime Directive to not influence the planet's development... his ultimate course of action, and one that clearly sickens him, is to pledge to give the helpless faction the exact same weapons and the same number of them that the non-Federation traders are selling the attacking faction, so that they can defend themselves even if this ultimately results in an escalation of the conflict all the way up to phasers and disruptors. His reasoning is that it isn't a violation of the Prime Directive because he isn't the one introducing the interfering element to the society, he's just matching it.

Videogames

• Metal Gear Solid dealt with several supersoldiers who were "created" due to the Government and military splicing their DNA with that of Big Boss's DNA. When Snake mentions that such an act is supposed to be banned under international law, Naomi Hunter explains that it is, but they don't apply as they were merely declarations, and not actual treaties.
  • Also with the Metal Gear launching nukes. Since it uses a rail gun and not fuel, it technically wasn't launching a rocket, so treaties wouldn't cover it.
• A meta-example is this Tool Assisted Speedrun of Donkey Kong Country 2. Unlike its predecessor, this run's main trick is using a debug sequence to acquire all the bonus coins early. This does save a bit of backtracking, but ultimately would take longer to reach the end of the credits. The kicker is this allows the speedrunner to get the last DK coin and see the True Ending first, then get the normal ending. Since TASVideos rules state the clock stops when the player loses control for the ending sequence, and this run therefore doesn't have to leave the clock running through the normal ending sequence despite taking slightly more time to do the same things in a different order, it's technically quicker.

Tabletop Games

• There's a saying among players of Star Fleet Battles: "Legal Officer, report to the bridge!" The fact that the rulebook is the size of the Manhattan phone directory doesn't help.
  • Players have been spotted with buttons reading "Scotty, I need a rule in five minutes or we're all dead!" (From Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, suitably tweaked).
  • Let's put it this way, when your group's resident rules lawyer talks about needing to spend an entire three-day weekend playing the game, he's probably not talking about actual playtime. The fact that he is positively gleeful at the prospect and keeps attempting to convince everyone else to do it should be another warning flag.
• Obviously, Dungeons & Dragons. People are fond of finding incredibly powerful abilities and combos that would allow them to create practically unbeatable characters. Two which stand out as blatant loophole exploitations are Pun-Pun, and the Locate City Bomb.
  • Chuck, The Fastest Metal Man. Rules Lawyering = MOVING FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
  • The most egregious example (although it is usually played for laughs) is the fact that while it has rules restricting what you can do while you are dying, there are no such rules for dead characters. By a completely literal interpretation of the rules, you could argue that there is no reason a dead player can't get right back up and continue adventuring without having to worry about hp anymore.
    • The rules for the 'dead' condition specify that the characters' soul has left his body. There is therefore a reason you can't get back up and continue adventuring -- you are no longer with the party, only your corpse is. Your character is now on his way to the Outer Planes and a lovely new career as a petitioner.
      • And petitioners are an NPC-only subtype without specific DM permission. Retire your character sheet.
• Nomic is a game for which (at least among most devotees of the game) rules lawyering is generally encouraged.
• Paranoia averts this: the players aren't even supposed to know the rules. If they show any sign that they do (a requisite of Rules Lawyering), the GM is basically authorized encouraged to kill their characters on the spot.
  • However some of the more complex strategies involve using one's (secret) knowledge of the rules to either manipulate an enemy into break a rule or to make them look like they've read the rules. The rulebook encourages this, as "reading the rules and lying about it" is perfectly in the spirit of the game.
• In Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 some of the background states that the Chaos Gods do this when they fight each other. They are each basically omnipotent in their own universe, so they cobble together a set of House Rules for each battle and then proceed to bend them as far as possible in their own favor.
  • Due to a combination of poor proofreading and lack of common sense on the player's part, it's fully possible to successfully argue a hilariously long list of crazy rules. Namely, you can argue that Walkers without actual sculpted eyes cannot shoot or "see" things because they have no actual eyes, a model with Rage does not follow its rules because "visible" and "line of sight" are clearly two different terms, and it's perfectly legal to deploy my army on the bookshelf and not on the table.
    • One of the Warhammer 40,000 army books has a weapon where the player has to draw a line from the gun to the target, and everything along the line is hit... The newer editions explicitly state that it's a straight line.
  • The Sisters of Battle are an in-universe example - though it was agreed upon, perhaps in hope they will remember what led to this: the Ecclesiarchy is forbidden by law from maintaining men under arms. They maintain women under arms instead.
• XDM: Xtreme Dungeon Mastering has a recommended tactic for dealing with players who do this obnoxiously. Borrow the player's character sheet under some pretense. Tell them that they're welcome to bring up rules and comment on how the DM isn't playing properly, but they're also going to have to quote the character's statistics during the game and being wrong will get their character killed. Admittedly, more a wishful fantasy than an effective tactic, but it does bring home the difficulty GMs trying to keep track of all of the possible rules and their interactions.
• In one of the books for The Dresden Files RPG, there is a section on the Unseelie Accords, the rules that govern interactions between the supernatural "nations". The Accords were written by Queen Mab, who set them up so that there is no "spirit of the Law", just the literal wording. A note by one of the characters in the margins even calls Mab a Rules Lawyer.
  • They're like this in the books (and mythology, for that matter) as well. In Summer Knight, after agreeing not to try to use the threat of retribution to coerce Harry into accepting her job, Mab tweaks his bad hand; when Harry complains that she agreed not to do any of that, she points out that that wasn't coercion, that was just for spite, which was completely acceptable according to the terms of their agreement.
• 4th edition Champions had a section titled "Are you a powergamer?" featuring 5 characters who bent the rules into a Gordian knot. Some examples included:
  • The Landlord. When purchasing a Base, for every +5 points your Base doubles in size. After spending a couple hundred points in this manner, you'll have a Base whose grounds cover the known universe. Furthermore, when purchasing Henchmen to man your Base, every +5 points doubles the number of henchmen you have; so at 170 points you can have 8 billion loyal followers (the entire population of Earth and then some).
    • An Obvious Rule Patch in the next edition changed the size scaling on Bases to be linear rather than geometric. No one really has any doubts as to why.
  • Nova Man. If anybody disturbs him in his private hospital ward, he explodes, doing 700d6 damage (to which he has personal immunity). He could afford such a big blast because he took enough physical limitations, vulnerabilities, and susceptibilities to be threatened by every molecule in the known universe.
    • Another Obvious Rule Patch (notice a trend?) in the following edition allows characters to only take X many points in disadvantages without special DM permission. Again, nobody's really doubting what the motivation was.
  • Azathoth. He has X-ray vision, scads of Telescopic vision, and a powerful Mental Attack. Since mental powers suffer no range penalty and only require line-of-sight, he can attack anyone anywhere in the universe without moving.
    • Amusingly, this one is still legal because changing it would require revamping the entire system on Mental and Sensory Powers. There is a specific caution notice in the 5th edition rulebook encouraging DMs to Rule Zero against anyone buying this specific combination of powers, however.

Web Originals

• The Other Wiki officially discourages this, though the practice is still widespread and sometimes works for those with a good understanding of the system.
  • Same with the Other Tropes Wiki.
• There is a character in the Whateley Universe whose codename is Loophole because of this. One of her famous moves was her fall combat final, when she noted there was nothing in the rules against using the arena to destroy itself.
• Mr. Welch seems to be a loonie Rules Lawyer. Many of the things he has tried are legal within the rules, which are indicated when he says he can't do something "even if the rules allow it." For example, making a pistol belt fed.

Webcomics

• Mike, in Something*Positive, at first. It's amazing what the threat of being sodomized by Redneck Trees will do for one's moral character.
• Happens a lot in DM of the Rings between the players and the DM, a few appearing as instances the DM is surprised the players paid attention to the material given to them, and was the main focus on one strip where Gimli realizes both he and Legolas, in-character, have morals that were opposed to disturbing the dead or otherwise side with them when the party reached the point of entering the caves, and another strip when Aragorn not only successfully argued to keep their horses (as in the ones they would have left in the camp site way back before the army of the dead ), but all the equipment the horses were left with and spoils gained from the last few battles.
  • In the followup comic Chainmail Bikini, Aragorn's player is replaced by one well-known to the DM to be a rules lawyering, minmaxing, powergaming munchkin. The DM attempts to thwart him by playing a game system he doesn't know, even demanding none of the other players give him the gamebook. One does anyway, and five minutes later, the munchkin has made this monstrosity.
• Lewis in Full Frontal Nerdity. Nelson technically does this a lot more than Lewis does, but tends not to do the 'assumption' part and instead water-proofs most of his acts from DM (and other players') intervention beforehand.
• Repeatedly in The Water Phoenix King—justified in that one of the heroes is a lawyer, and the story largely hinges on questions of rightful authority and jurisdiction, which means Bureaucracy. It's still hilarious every time it happens. (Especially when it's in the middle of a battle with a cyborg.)

Anthem: Is everyone but me a damn lawyer?

• Pete from Darths and Droids is usually more of a conventional Munchkin in trying to stack his stats to his own advantage, but isn't above trying this now and again. Though the DM manages to turn this around on him occasionally, most specifically by reminding him that he took a disadvantage that should make him unintelligible to other characters and he thus can't tell them what to do in situations where there's no translator, and they can therefore ignore his demands and urgings. Luckily, Pete has softened up on his munchkining and rules lawyering over the years, apparently simply enjoying the game for the camaraderie and for its own sake, which is a much more upbeat take on the situation than Darths and Droids inspiration DM of the Rings used.
• In Leftover Soup, Ellen chains together a string of attacks. (See also The Rant.)
• Brinksmanship cuts both ways.

Western Animation

• King of the Hill - Hank has to tell Bobby to stop playing 'lawyerball' instead of actually trying to win.
  • Ironically, Hank is the Johnny Cochrane of this trope.

Other

• Will on Sons of Guns occasionally has to work around some legal issues for clients. Such as, you CAN'T own a spring-loaded knife that shoots out. But you CAN own a knife-shooting GUN that uses gunpowder as a propellant.

Real Life

• In Model United Nations, rules lawyering is called "parliamentary maneuvering" and is considered to be a valuable skill in some circles. Additionally, since Model UN is supposed to be a simulation of real parliamentary-style debate, in which the rules are everything, Rule Zero simply does not exist.
  • That is not entirely true. Many chairs will ignore "parliamentary maneuvering" and force the debate forwards via force of personality. Indeed, it is widely considered to be irritating and spiteful to make incessant points of order, parliamentary procedure, etc, because it slows the debate to a crawl and generally makes everyone bored. It is also frequently exploited by WAAC (win at all costs) MUNers in order to give themselves the maximum amount of speech-time.
• High school debaters will, on occasion, delve into arguing about the process and rules of debate itself rather than the topic (either because they have no evidence that is on-topic to the specific case their opponent is running, or because they simply dislike the topic itself).
  • In the specific subdiscipline of policy debate, this is so highly developed, several of these arguments are taught as standard. The most common is Topicality: The Affirmative (the guys proposing a solution to the official problem, called the resolution) are actually off-topic. This usually rests on abuse of the dictionary, but if the Negative (the guys trying to shoot the Affirmative down) can prove it and convince the judge that it's worthwhile to consider, they win: if the Affirmative is off-topic, then they haven't "Affirmed" the resolution, and thus failed. Weird enough for ya? Other rules-lawyer arguments (called "Theory" in the jargon) are weirder.
  • Thankfully averted in debates with the "World Schools" (three speakers per side, with one making two speeches) and "British Parliamentary" (four speakers per side, one speech each) formats, where the rules and conventions are very clearly defined and rules lawyering or breaking will get you marked down by the judge.
• Carried out twice by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In late 2008, with a minority government, due in large part to questionable tactics he'd tried during budget planning, he was facing a motion of no-confidence that would bring down his government. So he prorogued Parliament, preventing the vote. Proroguing is only supposed to be used at the end of a parliamentary session, when the government has completed the agenda it set in the throne speech; using it to shutter Parliament is distinctly not on. When the new Parliament reconvened sometime later, the opposition unity had fallen apart. In late 2009, facing calls for an inquiry on Canadian involvement in torture in Afghanistan, questions about the economy and a bunch of other issues, he did it again (having gotten away with it the first time), claiming it was because of the Olympics distracting everyone (although the government seemed to manage okay the last time the country hosted the Games). The motion of no-confidence was successfully held and the parliament dissolved - only for Harper's party to gain more seats.
• Union General Benjamin Butler was a general ... and a lawyer ... and a politician, so he was awfully good at this. A full year before the Emancipation Proclamation, he made it policy to never return runaway slaves who made it into Union lines. It was a sort of "emancipation lite" for the area. When Butler was scolded for playing with the political powder keg of slavery, he logically, and with tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek pointed out that slaves were no more then animals, and like any animal being used by the enemy, were legitimate contrabands of war. The ex-slaves stayed in Union lines, often took paid jobs, and got a basic education.
• Truth in Television: Every major religion has at least a few people who read the holy texts or commandments of their particular religion this way.
  • The Orthodox Jews are especially notorious in this regard.
    • At the time of writing, Westhampton on Long Island is in a religious debate over the construction of an eruv, a small string which Orthodox Jews use to signify areas where some Sabbath laws can be broken. The Orthodox want to put a small, relatively inconspicuous string around town. The opponents, many of them Reform Jews, do not want this eruv built. One of many articles on the topic. Jon Stewart naturally had a field day with this on The Daily Show, mocking the "Thin Jew Line."
      • There's a philosophy that says that the whole point is to figure out exactly how Jewish law applies to every situation and exactly what its boundaries are; that's how you show respect to G-d.
      • And since many situations are not covered by the religious laws directly, you need to be or ask a Rules Lawyer what applies in your particular situation.
    • There's a sect of Christianity which preaches teetotalism as holy. And since it's holy, clearly it's in the Bible. Oh wait - there's all kinds of verses talking about Jesus and everyone drinking wine. No, they're drinking unfermented grape juice; that word only means "wine" when it's talking about how alcohol can be bad.
    • This neglects of course to acknowledge that unfermented grape juice makes no logical sense; it doesn't keep, is less sanitary, and grape juice naturally ferments. Grape juice as it exists today is pasteurized, that is, heated till the yeast dies.
      • The word used in the Hebrew texts definitely means wine, not unfermented juice. And ancient presses used for grapes were not clean enough for fermentation to be avoided; they simply lacked the means and desire.
  • An old saying is that even The Devil can quote The Bible to his own benefit (he even has a debate over it with Jesus in the New Testament). Quoting individual lines or phrases devoid of context is generally a good indication of this behavior, since if the full story or lesson was really saying that it would be more effective to use than just the quote.
    • Which is why quoting only part of a Biblical verse is frowned upon. There are, however, examples of rabbis doing this occasionally in the Talmud, and the interpretations they come up with are sometimes... interesting.
  • Islam is not the religion of peace, nor (as its detractors would have it) is it the religion of war. Islam is the religion of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anyone who's been a Muslim for more than five minutes has had to deal with a nosy uncle or auntie getting all up in their grill over something or another. Comedy blogger Maniac Muslim points out a few particularly annoying ones here and here and here and - well, it's a really big issue among the ummah (Muslim community).
    • (Also, you would not BELIEVE the drama surrounding which day marks the end of Ramadan. Muslims worldwide basically pick one of like three days to start Eid on. Somehow we manage to agree on every single other day of the calendar, but Eid? Never.)
    • This makes a great amount of sense, considering the explicit connections between Islam and Judaism. Jewish law and Islamic law work more or less the same way: rabbis and imams are basically all lawyers and judges in the courts of God's Law; the spiritual-advice thing started out as secondary. Or to be more succinct: Christian seminaries teach theology, with a bit of religious law on the side. Islamic and Jewish ones tend to focus more on religious law, with theology on the side. Additional problems in Islam appear because there are orders of magnitude more Muslims than there are Jews, and there are correspondingly more religious opinions (even with the Jews working overtime on having opinions), codified into four major Sunni schools of jurisprudence, plus one major Shiite one, plus several smaller Shiite ones, plus dissenters, and of course every Muslim is perfectly free to pick and choose from the smorgasbord of opinions, so long as they don't contradict each other (except for Shias, who typically follow one marja or ayatollah, but tend to pick and choose on the more minor matters addressed by lesser clerics).
• President Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. She just gave him a blowjob. Which was not sexual relations, by the legal definition of that place and time. So Clinton told a legal truth that pretty much every layperson (cough) would consider a lie.
  • This incident is particularly noteworthy because by the exact letter of the law, Monica Lewinsky was having sexual relations with President Clinton (giving oral sex is a sexual act) while he simultaneously was not having sexual relations with her (as the law failed to specify that receiving oral sex was also a sex act). Talk about badly written rules!
• As pointed out by the Dutch Formula 1 commentator Olav Mol; if the car ahead of you is faster then you can spend a lot of time, effort and money developing new innovations that make your car faster as well or you can spend just as much time but far less money finding a rule that forbids some aspect of your opponent's car.
  • Same thing often with with patenting applications or buying patents up-not to use them, but stopping competitors from doing so. Often, people do so just so they can sue people who infringe on the patent they never intended to use.
  • Henry "Smokey" Yunick was the king of this trope in NASCAR. He did everything from lowering the roof of the car (to improve the aerodynamics) to using an 11-foot coil of 2-inch tubing in lieu of a standard fuel line (to add 5 gallons of gas to the car's capacity). His reasoning was that everyone else was cheating at least 10 times as hard as his crew was, so it was self-defense.
• American tax protesters often attempt this trope with <ahem> non-standard readings of many laws, such as claiming that their salary is not "income" since it is only paper money and not gold or silver, or that the tax bill is for JOHN DOE, who is a totally different person from John Doe.
  • The most famous being that paying income taxes is optional because the U.S. code uses the word "voluntary" to refer to the system. In this case though, "voluntary" does not mean "optional" it means "You are going to volunteer (i.e. provide) your information to us. The IRS is not going to compute your taxes for you and send you a bill. You have to do your own paperwork."
  • Similar, equally unsuccessful, claims are made against courts. One example is claiming that since the flag on display has gold trim, which is not officially listed as part of the flag of the United States, it isn't officially a US Flag, and therefore the court has no legal authority.
• Capon was originally conceived by the Romans to get around a law forbidding the fattening of hens (the law was intended to conserve grain rations). The Romans simply castrated roosters and fattened them instead... with delicious results.
• In countries with written constitutions, challenging the constitutionality of a law is essentially this. Of course, whether it is the Lawful Evil or Lawful Good version depends on the circumstances of the law and one's own personal politics. And we'll leave that there.
• If an animated show goes past a certain number of episodes (around sixty) then the regular voice actors are entitled to a share of the profits under guild regulations. This is why many cartoons are cancelled after two seasons, so the networks can avoid paying out the extra money. However, technically, Ben 10 (52 episodes), Ben 10: Alien Force (46 episodes), Ben 10: Ultimate Alien (52 episodes) and Ben 10: Omniverse all count as different shows; Cartoon Network keep reworking and retitling the series before it qualifies. This may also be why Justice League was retooled into Justice League Unlimited, why Batman: The Animated Series became Batman and Robin and then New Batman Adventures, why Scooby Doo keeps getting rebooted, and so on.
• The deed of gift governing the rules of the America's Cup yacht race is governed by the New York State Supreme Court (which is actually a trial court in New York). Disputes are argued by actual lawyers and have gone before actual New York state judges. The most recent time the courts got involved occurred in 2010.
• During the California Gold Rush it was the custom of Chinese prospectors to buy passage on clipper ships to send dead kin and friends back to China to be buried in their home village. According to Capt. Charles Low of the Nat Palmer, this created an accounting problem-but one captain listed them as "passengers" (they were after all people) instead of "freight" (on the other hand they were dead people), primarily because he was entitled to an eighth share of the passenger manifest.

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Hey, is there some other kind of lawyer I wasn't aware of?