If you’re going to carry around a chicken in the city of Mobile, you’d better make sure that bird is in an upright position, because if said fowl is found upside down, police have every right to arrest you for such mischief.

Really.

If you think it sounds like one of those senseless and antiquated laws you hear about from a friend who spends too much time studying completely useless legal trivia, you’d be right.

That same friend might know that in Pennsylvania a house with more than 16 female occupants is considered a brothel and therefore illegal.

But Melissa Thomas of the city of Mobile’s legal department isn’t mentally stockpiling useless information like the upside down chicken law just for sport. Instead, Thomas says she knows about this peculiar law because the Code of Mobile, our city’s working legal document, is largely outdated, contradictory and many of its sections contain information in duplicate form.

“It was written over such a long period of time that it has become outdated,” Thomas said.

Because of duplicate and contradictory information, the city’s code is one of, if not the, longest in the state of Alabama, according to Mobile City Council Attorney Jim Rossler, who looked like he could have used some help holding up the gargantuan three-ring binder for all to see at the Feb. 19 city council meeting.

Thomas, who Rossler claims to be the only person to have read the Code of Mobile from front to back, has been preparing to consolidate the document for roughly a year now.

To do so, she is planning to request the help of the council’s rules committee. It is her hope the committee could meet and cover about a chapter at a time. There are 64 chapters in the Code of Mobile.

Some chapters contain laws pertaining to fortunetellers, barbers and masseuses, according to Thomas. “We’ll probably repeal those,” she said.

As she went around to different departments within the city to see how the code could be best consolidated without changing the legal restrictions that still apply to the Mobile of today, Thomas joked, “These people hated to see me coming.”

As to what cultural circumstances the upside down chicken statute reflects, Thomas said she didn’t really know.

“It might be some type of agricultural thing?” she guessed.

“It needs to be done. The thing has got to be about 60 years-old,” said District 5 Councilman John Williams, who also serves as the chairperson of the City Council’s rules committee.

District 6 Councilwoman Connie Hudson and District 1 Councilman Fred Richardson will join Williams and Thomas as rules committee members when called upon for the task.

Despite nonsensical laws from times past, Thomas says there have been instances recently when her review resulted in important changes to the code.

“We discovered the business license issue during this process,” she noted.

The issue to which Thomas refers was a discrepancy between state and city law in regards to the way businesses were to go about receiving a license.

The city’s sanctions require businesses with sub-stores – for example a grocery store with an attached pharmacy or other business – to purchase two business licenses for each. The new state mandate requires business owners to purchase only one business license so long as none of the sub-businesses make up more than 10 percent of total revenue.

The change resulted in a $1.1 million shortfall for the city, which is required to comply with state law. After weeks of debate, the council failed to agree on several proposals geared toward recovering the money.

“That was important to find, but some of the laws don’t even apply anymore, Thomas said. “It’s going to be a long process.”

But what brought the attention of city legal staffers to the code? You can trace their steps right back to the nonsensical again, Williams said.

“This all came to everyone’s attention when the goats and chickens (in Cypress Shores) were a hot topic,” he suggested. “They had to figure out if it was legal or not to have them and they stumbled upon some of this other stuff.”

The Cypress Shores neighborhood dispute was well chronicled by Lagniappe. In addition to livestock inhabiting a residential yard — much to the chagrin of surrounding neighbors — the dispute also involved toilets being used as front yard flower planters, which is legal under the Code of Mobile.

Makes the upside chicken thing seem not so bad after all.