Oh probably not. But Kevin Underhill, at his brilliant, satirical take on the worst of law, Lowering The Bar, writes something in his excellent and hilarious treatise on Article 41 of Magna Carta and how some, uh, insurrectionists tried to take command of Edinburgh Castle instead of paying the entry fee…
That sentence was threatening to run on. Here’s what I’m getting to in Kevin’s (I don’t know him but I’ve been reading him for years and love him madly so…) dissertation:
You know how you’re sometimes stuck writing something by committee, and there’s that one guy who has an idea that’s stupid but he just won’t shut up about it, and finally everybody else realizes that it’ll be a lot easier to just put his stupid idea in there so you can all move on with your lives, and it won’t cause any harm because it’s an obvious non-starter that nobody’s ever going to bother with anyway?
Pretty sure that’s how we got Article 61.
And I’m pretty sure that’s how Tennessee got the 1925 Butler Act, which was the biblical inspiration for the ACLU action leading to the Scopes Trial.