Are these 20 actions listed below legal or illegal? Find out.
1. Teacher confiscates your phone at school
There’s no law against it. If it’s on the school’s policy and in their handbook that they can confiscate your phone, then your teacher can. Whether they can go through and look at your data is an entirely different issue.
They shouldn’t have access to things that aren’t on your phone but are actually in the cloud. Some laws protect you on that, but for things on your phone, if they have a legitimate reason to believe that it leads them to a violation of school policy or the law, they can look.
2. Carrying a sword
Yes! Since 2017, carrying a knife with a blade of over 5.5 inches has been legal.
In Texas, you can carry a Bowie knife, a Rambo knife, a dagger, a machete, and yes, even a sword.
3. Harvest rainwater in the state of Texas
It is, in fact, legal for you to harvest rainwater. You don’t even need a permit.
4. Own a pet monkey in Texas
It is, in fact, legal for you to own a monkey. The laws in Texas regarding owning monkeys are pretty wide open. You can own monkeys both from the new world and the old world.
5. Drive barefoot
Believe it or not, no law in Texas governs what type of foot boyer you must wear when driving. So no law says you can’t drive barefoot, which means you can.
6. Eat horse
This is interesting because while it is illegal in Texas and has been illegal since 1949 to sell horses for slaughter or consumption, you can actually eat a horse. So, there’s no law against it. There’s just a law against selling horses to be slaughtered.
7. Eat sharks
Absolutely. In the state of Texas, you are allowed to eat sharks. You can harvest an entire shark and use everything in it, but you can’t just take a shark’s fin and leave it to die. But eating sharks is legal. And from what I’ve heard, it’s good eats.
8. Give your child alcohol
In the state of Texas, the legal age to drink is 21 years old. There is an exception. If you are the parent, the spouse, or the guardian of a child, and they are within your visible presence, you can provide them with alcohol and allow them to drink in your visible presence.
9. Join the mile-high club
This may surprise you, but technically, no law outlaws having sex on an airplane. Now other laws apply. For example, you can’t do it in the open where other people may see you.
That’s indecency. But if you have it in a bathroom on a plane where no one else can see you, no law says you can’t.
10. Is it legal to lane-split
In Texas, no law explicitly allows lane splitting. The Texas Transportation Code says vehicles should stay in one lane. So as far as the laws are written in the state of Texas right now, motorcycles cannot lane split. It is a violation of Texas law.
11. Listen to police radio in Texas
Like in most states, it’s not a crime to listen to police radio through a scanner. In fact, those phones have apps that you can download and listen to police radio.
12. Live in the storage unit
According to Texas law, no, it’s not. Texas law explicitly prohibits using a self-storage unit as a residence.
You can’t do it yourself, and you can’t give someone else permission.
13. Marry a cousin
In at least half the States, you can marry your first cousin, and in my state, Texas, happily, I can say you cannot marry your first cousin.
Now, if you got a hot second cousin, that’s legal in all 50 states.
Is this my first cousin? Is this my second cousin? We have a handy dandy chart for you to figure that out.
14. Record phone calls
Texas is considered a one-party consent state. That means that at least one person involved in the conversation must consent to record the conversation, whether it’s a phone or an in-person conversation, if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy.
15. Ride in the back of an open-bed truck
Did you know that in Texas, it is legal to ride in the back of an open-bed truck, but only if you’re over 18? So, if you’re under 18, there are very few circumstances when you could ride in the back of an open-bed truck.
Those circumstances will be, maybe you’re driving on the beach, you can ride in the back if you’re under 18, in a parade, and it’s been approved by local law.
You can ride in the back if you’re under 18, and if you’re going from farm to farm or field to field outside of a city on a market road or a county road, then you can ride in the back of a truck if you’re under the age of 18.
16. Ship alcohol in Texas
Basically, in Texas, unless you have a permit, you cannot ship alcohol.
And in Texas, a liquor store can only ship alcohol to a customer who is in the same county as that liquor store.
17. Sleep in my car
Oh, this one seems super simple. You own the car; you can permit yourself to sleep in it. Answer solved, right? Except the question then becomes where your car is parked. If you park your car in your backyard, can you sleep in it? Absolutely.
However, if you park your car in a business parking lot, things aren’t clear because if that business doesn’t allow people to be there after hours, between midnight and 3:00 AM, or whatever, you could be trespassing, and that means you might go to jail.
18. Taxidermy a human
You are all taking Halloween too seriously this year. The answer is no.
It is not legal to taxidermy a human anywhere in the United States. In Texas, messing with the body of a deceased person could be considered abuse of a corpse, and that’s a state jail felony.
19. Travel with Delta eight
Delta eight is legal in Texas, so traveling with it around the state is acceptable. Remember, they tried to make Delta eight illegal until a judge in Austin said, Nope, not going to happen. But for right now, in the state of Texas, Delta eight is legal.
So it’s legal to travel with it.
20. Dumpster dive
When you throw something out, you put it in the trash can, you throw it on the curb, or you throw it in the dumpster. Typically, that is considered abandoned property.
However, the dumpster still belongs to somebody. So, for example, it belongs to the apartment complex or the neighborhood association. So when you’re going in, you’re actually going into someone else’s property, to a third person’s abandoned property.
It’s very complicated and typically governed by ordinances from the local communities.
Hope you found this useful.
