10 Surprising Legal Gaps That Let Chaos Ensue

We tend to assume that there’s a law on the books for every situation. But legal systems often lag behind reality, leaving major gaps at the worst possible moments. Whether it was due to technological change, moral blind spots, or pure legislative oversight, these are moments when people turned to the law—and the law shrugged.

Here are 10 real cases where states had no legal framework for what had just happened, and things got weird, dangerous, or downright absurd.

Related: Top 10 Outdated Laws You Didn’t Know You Were Breaking?utm_source=seealso&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=direct

10 What Happens When a Presidential Candidate Dies Mid-Election

If a presidential candidate dies after ballots are printed—but before the general election or the Electoral College votes—there is no consistent federal legal answer for what happens next. The U.S. Constitution is clear on presidential succession after inauguration but silent on what to do in the gray zone between election and swearing-in. The process is left up to political parties and a mosaic of state laws, some allowing parties to name replacements, others locking in the deceased candidate. In most cases, states can’t even reprint ballots.

The most chaotic example came in 1872 when Horace Greeley—who lost the popular vote but had 66 electors pledged to him—died before the Electoral College met. Those electors were left to vote for whomever they wanted, and no two agreed. Some cast their ballots for Greeley anyway, even though he was dead. Others chose his running mate, while a few went rogue. Congress ended up discarding most of the votes. To this day, if a nominee dies mid-election, there’s no constitutional blueprint. And with increasingly older presidential candidates, it’s not just a theoretical concern.^[1]

9 No Law Against Animal-Human Hybrid Embryos in Several States (Ongoing)

In 2021, scientists in California created the first viable human-monkey chimera embryos, inserting human stem cells into macaque embryos and allowing them to develop for up to 20 days. The goal? One day, growing human-compatible organs in animals. While this research raises massive ethical concerns, most U.S. states have no laws regulating it. Federal funding is restricted, but private labs operating on private dollars can continue almost unchecked—creating a legal Wild West for one of the most unsettling frontiers in biotechnology.

The only federal guidance comes from the NIH, which doesn’t fund this kind of work—but that’s not a ban, just a budget limit. Individual states like California have vague restrictions around fetal and stem cell experimentation, but many others have nothing at all on the books. That means creating human-animal hybrids in certain jurisdictions is technically legal, even as bioethicists raise alarms about cognition, sentience, and exploitation. In the absence of explicit legislation, the limits of what’s allowed are set by what researchers are willing to try.^[2]

8 No Law Regulating Self-Driving Cars in Arizona (Until After a Fatal Crash)

Arizona welcomed autonomous vehicle testing with open arms in the mid-2010s, offering light regulation and warm weather for ideal testing conditions. Uber, Waymo, and other companies flocked to the state. But in 2018, a self-driving Uber test vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe—the first fatal crash involving a fully autonomous system. The incident revealed that Arizona had no specific law requiring human oversight, safety protocols, or even clear liability for operating autonomous vehicles.

The backup driver in the car was streaming Hulu on her phone at the moment of the crash. Uber had previously disabled emergency braking systems to avoid erratic behavior. Yet under state law, it wasn’t clear who was responsible: the company, the software, the driver, or the state for failing to regulate any of it. Only after the fatality did Arizona update its guidelines. But for years, AV companies had tested life-and-death systems on public roads with virtually no legal boundaries simply because lawmakers hadn’t imagined the technology would arrive so fast.^[3]

7 No Law Against Child Marriage in New Hampshire (Until 2018)

Before 2018, New Hampshire allowed girls as young as 13 and boys as young as 14 to marry, with parental consent and judicial approval. While the law was a relic of older times, it remained on the books and enforceable, and was still being used. Between 1995 and 2012, at least 323 minors were married in the state—some of them in arrangements that later raised concerns about coercion or abuse. When activists began campaigning to raise the marriage age to 18, lawmakers resisted, saying it was rare and didn’t need fixing.

The proposal to end child marriage initially failed in the state’s House of Representatives in 2017, with some legislators calling it “a solution in search of a problem.” It wasn’t until the issue received national attention—and comparisons to states with child bride loopholes—that New Hampshire finally passed a law raising the age to 16 and later to 18. Until that change, the state that touts itself as “Live Free or Die” had no modern legal safeguard against one of the oldest forms of institutionalized consent loopholes in America.^[4]

6 No Law Covering Artificial Insemination in Oklahoma Divorce Cases (Until 2016)

In a 2016 Oklahoma divorce case, a woman became pregnant via artificial insemination using a sperm donor during her marriage [LINK 5]. When the couple separated, the husband argued that he never consented to the insemination and, therefore, shouldn’t be legally responsible for the child. But Oklahoma law at the time didn’t require written consent from a spouse—or even a legal framework for how assisted reproduction factored into paternity. The judge ruled that because the child was born during the marriage, he was presumed the legal father and liable for child support.

The decision sparked widespread confusion. Lawyers pointed out that the state’s family code hadn’t been updated to reflect developments in reproductive technology. The law assumed that pregnancy happened through intercourse, not medical intervention. Critics argued that without formal consent, spouses could be held accountable for children they had no role in creating. Oklahoma eventually revised its law to require explicit spousal consent for assisted reproduction. Still, couples operated under outdated rules for years with no clarity on parental rights, obligations, or protections.^[5]

5 No Law Against Flying Drones over Private Property in Texas (Until 2021)

By the late 2010s, drones had become cheap, popular, and increasingly invasive. Texans began reporting drones hovering over private land, pools, windows, and even inside backyards. Ranchers complained of drones spooking livestock, while suburban homeowners feared surveillance or voyeurism. But when they contacted law enforcement, they learned that no Texas law explicitly prohibited flying a drone over private property, even if it carried a camera. The FAA regulated airspace, but local privacy concerns were largely unaddressed.

It wasn’t until 2021 that Texas passed HB 1758, which made it a misdemeanor to use drones to capture images of private property without the owner’s consent. Until then, property owners were caught in a legal no-man’s land: they couldn’t sue under trespass law because drones didn’t touch the ground, and there were no drone-specific privacy statutes to lean on. For years, companies and individuals used the loophole freely—filming everything from weddings to oil pipelines—while residents were told that what happened 30 feet above their homes wasn’t really theirs to control.^[6]

4 No Law Defining Marriage by Gender in Massachusetts (2003)

When same-sex couples sued for marriage equality in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, many expected the case to be shot down based on existing statutes. However, during deliberations, the state’s highest court found something surprising: nowhere in Massachusetts General Laws did marriage explicitly state it was between a man and a woman. The statutes referred to “persons” or “spouses” but avoided gender-specific language. That legal silence became the opening that allowed the court to rule in favor of marriage equality.

In the 2003 Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision, the Supreme Judicial Court held that same-sex couples could not be denied marriage licenses under the existing law—because nothing in that law prohibited them from applying. It wasn’t until after the ruling that opponents tried to introduce bills to add a gender definition. Still, by then, the legal door had opened. The absence of a definition, whether intentional or not, made Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage—not by changing the law, but by noticing what the law had forgotten to say.^[7]

3 No Law Against Cyberstalking in California (Until 1999)

In the late 1990s, a woman in Southern California became the target of a terrifying campaign by her ex-boyfriend. He impersonated her online, posted her home address and phone number in adult chat rooms, and encouraged men to visit her residence for sexual encounters. Despite the clear psychological torment and risk to her safety, the police were powerless—because California had no law against cyberstalking or internet-based harassment [LINK 8]. The threats were online. The law was stuck in the offline world.

Her case became one of the first national wake-up calls for digital abuse legislation. It took until 1999 for California to update its criminal code, making it a punishable offense to use electronic communication to threaten or harass someone repeatedly. But by that time, countless victims had already faced online abuse with no legal protection. The state—and most of the country—had assumed that harassment laws written in the 1970s would still apply without considering that technology had fundamentally changed how people could be attacked, impersonated, and surveilled.^[8]

2 No Law Against Drunk Boating in Missouri (Until 2006)

For decades, Missouri law criminalized drunk driving but did not apply the same standard to boats, even on its most popular waterways. The Lake of the Ozarks—a sprawling, booze-heavy tourist magnet—became a hotspot for accidents, fights, and reckless behavior. Law enforcement could cite operators for general misconduct or disorderly conduct. Still, nothing stopped someone from legally operating a boat while over the alcohol limit. It wasn’t technically illegal, and judges often dismissed citations due to a lack of statutory backing.

That changed in 2006 after a series of high-profile boating deaths and a wave of public outrage. Lawmakers quickly passed legislation to formally criminalize boating while intoxicated, but by then, Missouri had spent years as a legal outlier. While other states had moved to regulate alcohol on waterways, Missouri’s laws had never caught up. People died in preventable crashes, families lost loved ones, and authorities had no choice but to respond with warnings instead of charges. The state had left its largest recreational space operating under a loophole that turned alcohol-fueled recklessness into a legal gray zone.^[9]

1 No Law Against Cannibalism in Utah (1970s)

In the 1970s, a Utah man who survived a mountain plane crash turned to cannibalism to stay alive after all other food sources were exhausted. When rescued, he openly admitted to consuming parts of fellow passengers who had already died in the crash. Authorities were horrified but quickly discovered no Utah statute made cannibalism itself illegal—as long as it didn’t involve murder or desecration of a corpse under specific conditions. The act, gruesome as it was, did not violate any written law.

The case made headlines and forced state legislators to scramble. Within a year, Utah revised its laws to make cannibalism explicitly illegal under most circumstances, even in survival cases. But for a brief period, the law had no language governing one of humanity’s most taboo acts. Legal scholars noted that lawmakers never imagined they’d need to write it down—assuming such behavior would never happen or that general morality covered it. It didn’t. In the absence of a specific law, prosecutors had nothing to charge.^[10]