Loophole Abuse

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Someone does something outrageous by finding a loophole in the rules, which were too narrowly written to consider such impossibilities. Loophole Abuse is a form of Refuge in Audacity -- which still allows the agent to claim they were following the rules.

You never said which x...

Q: Explain Newton's First Law of Motion in your own words. Calvin (writing): Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz. Calvin: I love loopholes. —Calvin and Hobbes

Sometimes the loophole doesn't even really exist, but the competitor makes everyone think it does. Occasionally the loopholes were planted to enable Loophole Abuse.

Compare Screw the Rules I Make Them. Also contrast Bothering By the Book, where someone becomes a pest by following the rules to the letter, without looking for loopholes. If someone else finds a loophole, it's My Rule Fu Is Stronger Than Yours. Not unknown as a subversion of Just Following Orders and Exact Words. If a rule is instituted solely to close the loophole, you have an Obvious Rule Patch.

In games, this may often be the result of some kind of oversight by the creators. A programming oversight can cause someone to do something they did not actually intend, such as killing a mob intended to be invincible.

Common variants are the Animal Athlete Loophole which exists because no rule bars animals from playing sports, and Flexible Tourney Rules, wherein a characters abilities may violate the rules of the game. Kwyjibo is Loophole Abuse for Scrabble. When applied to Tabletop Games, it becomes the annoying Rules Lawyer. See also Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty.

In Real Life this is rare for two simple reasons: First, loopholes are quickly closed once discovered. Second, many systems have Rule Zero: some designated referee, judge, or authority figure has the absolute final word...

A favorite weapon of the Jackass Genie.

Of course, this rarely happens in fictional instances, because of the Rule of Drama.

See also Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught. Related to the Lord British Postulate, which may require some Loophole Abuse to actually pull off the kill.

Examples

Advertising

• This Segata Sanshiro commercial. Apparently there's no rule against grabbing a guy off the sideline and hurling him at the ball to score a goal for your team.

Anime and Manga

• In episode 8 of Code Geass R2 (second season), Zero accepts Nunnally's plans to restart the SAZ (Special Administrative Zone, where there was no distinction between the Britannians and the elevens, formerly Japanese), and privately makes a deal with the Knights of the Round that he would be exiled instead of executed for his most recent terrorist actions. Suzaku agrees to the plan, and then after they announce Zero's exile, the Black Knights create a smokescreen in the area with 1 million Japanese, during which they all don Zero costumes. Since they were all Zero, Suzaku would either have to let them all go, or else order another massacre which would no doubt caused more rioting and rebellion in Area 11, as happened accidentally the first time around at the end of Season 1.
• In Beyblade there is a rule that you can't attack another player, but it doesn't count if you can't see the weapon. Bryan was able to seriously injure Ray by attacking him with air control.
• Ranma 1/2
  • The rules for Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics clearly state that the only valid method of attack is with a tool. Barehanded (or barefooted) contact is strictly forbidden and can result in immediate disqualification. However, this doesn't stop Kodachi from modifying her gymnastics tools into clubs with retractable spikes, ropes which snap into iron rods, razor-sharp hoops, and explosive balls... or simply snagging whatever she can wrap her ribbon around (including Kuno) and hurling it back at her enemy. Of course, it doesn't keep Ranma from using anything she can get her hands or feet on (including Ryouga Akane's pet piglet,) or demolishing the ring itself with kicks and punches. Kodachi using her bokken-wielding brother was also considered a valid attack.
    • It goes one step further - the rule forbids attacking your opponent without a legal weapon. Ranma wins by kicking the post Kodachi's standing on, breaking it and dropping her to the floor. Ranma then clings like a limpet to the broken halves of the post to stay off the floor herself.
  • In both versions this is how Kodachi "justifies" remaining the first true member of Ranma's Unwanted Harem (not counting Akane Tendo, on virtue of her being the Official Couple), despite having promised to give up on Ranma if she lost the match. Having agreed to "abandon her present affection for Ranma", she explains that she now "burns with entirely brand new passion for him" when she tells girl-type Ranma that she will be coming after Ranma again.
  • In anime version of the climax to the Phoenix Pill saga, Ranma needs to win a combination of downhill race and running battle in order to win the pill that will undo the Full-Body Cat's Tongue point that keeps him locked in female form. Unfortunately, he's never skied before, so he stinks at it. Akane mercifully throws him some snowshoes and points out there's no rule saying he has to ski down the slope, just that he has to reach the finish line first with an unbroken miniature snowman. Ranma takes things a step further by soon after hitching a ride on the back of an angry black bear.
• In ~Mamotte! Lollipop~, female lead Nina is distressed to learn that the contest for gaining a professional wizard's license has no rule against killing human beings (i.e. her) to obtain the Magic Pearl.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena: Ain't no rule that says a girl can't wear a boy's uniform! Apparently there's no rule that says it has to be the same color as everyone else's, either!
  • Fruits Basket: ...and vice-versa.
• Dragonball's Greatest Under the Heavens martial art tournament's regulations are full of loop holes. If you don't touch the floor out of the ring, you can fly, grow, become a giant monkey, multiply yourself, use fire-guns, stink and a long etc.
  • They do have one moment of Obvious Rule Patch: Goku uses the Nimbus (a controllable semi-solid cloud) to return to the ring after being launched out of it (this was before he could fly). The officials find themselves in a dilemma: Goku didn't technically touch the ground outside the ring, but do clouds count as "out of the ring" if one can stand on them? They finally allow it this once, but also state that if Goku does that again, he'll be disqualified.
  • Similarly, in the Cell Games, Cell decides to eliminate the possibility of either side losing by a simple ring-out by destroying the whole arena.
• Pretty much the whole point of ninja training in Naruto; one is supposed to barrel on through the rules.
  • The written part of the Chuunin Exam is one example. The test consists of ten incredibly difficult questions and cheaters are disqualified after being caught cheating a few times. Similarly to the real life Spartan example below, the true purpose of the test is not to determine the candidate's knowledge, but to test their ability to gather the required information without being caught cheating. Naruto accidentally discovers a real loophole in the written test: you only fail if you're caught trying to cheat, but the test is played up in a way that there is no penalty for not trying at all.
  • Naruto also does this with training which does not involve rules-- any time he can't get past a certain stage of a training he always finds some clever way to bypass it. For instance, Jiraiya figured he couldn't get past a point in the Rasengan training because he couldn't randomize the rotation of chakra with one hand--so Naruto just used his other hand to make the rotation random himself.
    • His shadow clones are Loophole Abuse incarnate. Any time he needs to do something that can't be done (either at all or in X amount of time), shadow clones help circumvent the rules. It's how he managed to master the Rasengan (use a clone to focus the chakra) and then later evolve it into the Rasenshuriken (a second clone injects Wind-elemental chakra).
• Liar Game. The day Akiyama actually plays a game without looking for loopholes will be the day of the apocalypse.
  • Of course, deducing the hidden meanings and ramifications of the rules, then exploiting them to win is the wholly intentional part of the eponymous game.
• During Eclipse's song-length game in Basquash, the rules are that the game shall run until the end of the song. Rouge is "hurt", trying to force defeat on Dan's team, but Flora exploits a loophole when she reveals that Eclipse don't have to be the ones singing. She leads the crowd in song, letting the game finish.
• In Bleach:
  • Following a good asskicking by Ichigo, Byakuya Kuchiki becomes more willing to bend the rules a bit. This is made especially clear in the Arrancar / Hueco Mundo arc, where he was sent to bring back Rukia and Renji to the Soul Society, Yamamoto having forbade them from infiltrating Hueco Mundo to rescue Orihime. He notes that while he was ordered to bring them back, he had no orders on what to do after that. He actively provides them with desert-proof cloaks to wear and helps them return to the human world and then looks the other way when they make contact with Urahara in order to get to Hueco Mundo.
    • He abused this clause again when he was "facebooked" by Tsukishima's power. Tsukishima expected that thanks to Byakuya's honor, he will not be defeated. Byakuya replied (after punching through him) that it doesn't change the fact he is Ichigo's enemy.
  • From the Amagai Arc, when the Gotei 13 is ordered to apprehend Ichigo, Byakuya tells Renji to lead the 6th squad, saying that he's going to keep his nose out of the whole affair. In other words he said " I can't break the rules and help Ichigo, but I can turn over all my authority to my crazy vice-captain who will do just that, and then I pretend I never saw it coming."
  • Uryuu sort of does this in order to join Ichigo and Chad to go to Hueco Mundo. In return for his father agreeing to help him get his Quincy powers back, Ryuuken made Uryuu promise that in future, he would no longer associate with the Shinigami or any of their associates. Uryuu manages to bend the rules thanks to some lucky circumstances: Ichigo is not a true Shinigami, just a substitute Shinigami, and, by Kisuke's wording, one that has been abandoned by Soul Society. In other words, neither a Shinigami nor one of their associates. Ichigo even calls it "twisted logic".
• The Davy Back Fight of One Piece allows the team that wins each match to pick a member of the opposing team and force him or her to join their crew. In the third round, Nami considers choosing Foxy, who is set to compete in the Combat event against Luffy, so that they win by default in the third match and can easily get Chopper back. While some members of the opposing team hypocritically protest (they had already done the same thing to one of the three Straw Hat set to compete in the second event), Robin notes that this is legal, but none of the Straw Hats want Foxy with them.
  • After an Obvious Rule Patch and a boxing match, 497 Foxy members are forced to join Luffy's companions. Luffy's ship, the Going Merry, cannot carry that many people, besides he doesn't want them anyway. However, a pirate captain's orders are absolute, and there's no rule a captain cannot assign his crew a mission to be dismissed.
  • A far less humorous example comes up far earlier on. In Nami's backstory, she makes a deal with Arlong; If she works as his cartographer, he'll sell her back her village and release her from service if she can raise 100 million beri. Years later, she's only 7 million away from that goal, but Arlong doesn't want to let her or her village go, so he has a corrupt Navy officer confiscate her stash. When Nami accuses Arlong of trying to break the deal, the bastard smugly retorts, "When did I break my word?"
• In the third sound stage of the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Fate is unable to contact Nanoha in real time because of restrictions placed on her for her trial, which is why they exchange video letters to see each other's faces and hear each other's voices. During a celebration of the anniversary of Fate making a contract with her Familiar Arf, Lindy allows Fate to see a video link of Nanoha launching Starlight Breaker fireworks and Amy suggests that the video, lagging behind by 0.05 seconds, is not technically real time.
• Higa of Sekirei pulls this, bringing extra Sekirei to the third match, stating that it's okay as long as they don't fight.
• In IGPX Immortal Grand Prix, on two separate occasions teams get away with doing things that logically should never be attempted, as there was no rule covering it. The first time, a team creates a tornado that was just as likely to get them killed as it was to win them the race. The second time, another team uses devices to take control of their opponents' vehicles. The rules are amended both times to stop them from repeated abuse, but they get away with their victories. The second team would also later reveal (in the final race) that their vehicles were actually Combining Mecha that could effectively block the entire track, but they lost that race (though the mecha blocked the track horizontally, Team Satomi made it past by using their own loophole: since there's no rule against jumping, they went vertical, leaping over the mech and dashing away, forcing it back into a straight race).
• Yu-Gi-Oh:
  • Yugi exploits an infinite loop combo that Marik/Strings used to fill his hand... to mill his own deck. Mind you, this stunt is not indicative of how Revival Jam and Brain Control actually work in the real card game, to say nothing of the fact that God Cards don't have real effects for a reason.
  • Similarly, the Legendary Dragons in the Doma Arc can do freaky infinite-loop tricks because they're already logistical nightmares when it comes to explaining how they work. Apparently, the way the Japanese "Dragon" Cards work is that any character who picks them up immediately gains a fusion deck about two feet deep to represent every possible fusion combo that the Dragon in question may form.
• The rules of the Death Note say that you can't use it to cause murders; in the Live Action Adaptation, Light gets around this by setting up two deaths so that the only possible way they could occur is if Person A kills Person B. Ryuk is so impressed, he tells Light that he'd make a better Shinigami than any of the ones he knows.
  • If you want to know the specifics, he wrote "Naomi Misora will take her gun and go to an abandoned part of the museum at 5:00 PM, then shoot herself six minutes later" and "Shiori will go to an abandoned part of the museum and get shot dead at 5:05 PM". He also points out that Japanese gun control laws (that is, civilians are not allowed to own them) make it extremely unlikely that any other guns would be around to mess this up.
• Both Leonard Apollo and Himura Youichi in Eyeshield 21 used loopholes to get out of their obligations and back into their respective countries. Apollo stated that if they failed to beat the Devilbats by at least 10 points, the NASA Aliens would never return to America. When they failed to meet that goal, Apollo revealed that he was just going to change the team's name to the NASA Shuttles; That way, it technically wouldn't be the NASA Aliens going back. Likewise Hiruma said that if the Devil Bats didn't beat the Aliens by at least 10 points the entire team would leave Japan. However he never said they would leave Japan forever...
• Saitama Chainsaw Girl has protagonist Fumio observing that there's no rule against bringing a chainsaw to school, after the student council president tells her off for not switching to her school shoes. This being while Fumio is holding a bloody chainsaw.
• Rocket Girls: Ain't no rule that says you can't send a high school girl into space!
• In Urusei Yatsura, Mendō says that, although motorcycles aren't allowed at school, there's no rule against helicopters.
• Invoked but averted in chapter 42 of the manga version of Shinryaku! Ika Musume. During a soccer match where Ika is performing poorly, her teammates realize the rules only say non-goalkeeper players can't use hands to move the ball. There's not a thing in the rules about tentacles (especially since Ika's tentacles are technically part of her head, which explicitly can be used to move the ball). But since Ika's trying really hard to play the normal way, they don't mention this loophole to avoid hurting her pride.
• G Gundam has quite a few instances of nations finding loopholes in the rules. One of the most famous is the Nether Gundam; the rules say that any Gundam that goes through the Survival 11 without losing its head makes it to the finals. Neo Holland's Gundam turned into a windmill, spent the 11 months hiding without participating in a single fight, and qualified (didn't do very well afterwards though). Then there's Neo Nepal: the rules say that you can't kill your opponent during a Gundam Fight, but there Ain't No Rule that keeps you from going around assassinating your opponents right before your match...
• In Beelzebub, when Oga is asked whether or not he's going to play volleyball with a baby clinging to his back, everybody agrees something to the effect that it's okay since the baby is a part of him. Later in the match, the Ishiyama team hilariously use Baby Beel to distract/trick the other team.
• At least in Bokurano's anime, it's played straight twice in a row when Kokopelli asked Koyemshi to let him fight the last battle on their Earth and the demo battle on the next Earth so his also contracted daughter Yuu wouldn't have to fight. When Koyemshi stated it was impossible, Machi stated he could do just that because there is no rule that prevents you from becoming the pilot for more than one battle. Koyemshi retaliated: the rules are specific enough to state that you're still bound to the contract and keep being the pilot if you survive the battle without moving because the robot just sucks your life out to move. Kokopelli moved, so he technically doesn't have to be the pilot for the next battle. No points for guessing who was the one selected as the final pilot.
• In Darker Than Black, only the Contractor's original body is obliged to fulfill their Renumeration which, obviously, doesn't have to be fulfilled if said body dies. Thus, there are two sorts of Contractors who can effectively obtain free use of their powers: Contractors with Grand Theft Me powers that lost their original bodies (such as Mao), or Contractors whose powers aren't actually their own (such as Hei).
• For the most part, angels only officiate the Queens Blade competition. However, there are no rules against angels entering it - which Nanael discovers, to her dismay, when the head angel makes her enter (because Queen Aldra is not someone you want in charge for longer than you have to).
• Sora no Otoshimono has Angeloids, All-Powerful Robot Angel Genies which programmed to do anything that their master tells them to, with the caveat that they cannot cancel an order once it has been given. That doesn't stop them from forgetting that their master gave a specific order, or making it so that whatever went wrong was All Just a Dream.
• Done by virtually every team other than Team Urameshi during the Dark Tournament arc of Yu Yu Hakusho.
• Digimon Xros Wars the Young Hunters Leaping Through Time has an excellent example of this in one episode. A powerful Digimon is blocking all of our heroes' attacks with a seemingly impenetrable barrier. It's suggested that they bring out Shoutmon X4, the signature Digimon of the previous season, but the problem is that, in the current situation, the humans are forbidden from combining more than two Digimon at once, and cannot have more than one present and fighting at a given time. Since X4 is a combination of four Digimon, it would seem impossible to bring him out- but Taiki figures out how to circumvent this. He temporarily lends two of X4's components to teammate Yuu, then they perform the Double Xros maneuever, each using two Digimon, which enables them to successfully Xros Shoutmon X4.
• Inverted, then played straight in Rinne no Lagrange: There's no rule saying that a student may pilot a Humongous Mecha... nor is there a rule saying they may not do so.
• Ai no Kusabi has ruling Blondie Iason Mink making Badass Biker Riki his Pet. Something that just isn't done since Riki is a "mongrel", disenfranchised with no hope of climbing the social ladder and owning Pets indicate one's social status. Iason claims he doesn't have to follow the protocols for owning a Pet with Riki because he's a mongrel, has no official identity and thus the rules don't apply to him.
• The latest arc of manga Katekyo Hitman Reborn is a battle royal with one set of rule that really straightforward and simple it's a wonder why no team tried to exploit for seventeen chapters. Vindice exploit the loophole with attacking other teams outside of assigned time without wearing their representative watch and Varia also did the same though in their case Squalo just make a come back because they happened to have a spare watch and as lampshaded by himself, there is no rule about using the spare watch
• In Eyeshield 21, after seeing an insulting viral video that embarrasses the NASA Aliens coach Apollo, he furiously declares that if the team doesn't win more than 10 points in the game against Deimon, the NASA Aliens would never go back to America. Despite winning the game, it was less than a 10-point difference. So Apollo declares that he's renaming the team to the NASA Shuttles so the NASA Aliens won't be returning.
  • Hiruma does the same thing. In challenge of Apollo's statement, he said that if the Devilbats doesn't win by more than 10 points, the entire team will leave Japan. However, he never said they would not be coming back.

Comics

• In one album of De Rode Ridder ("The Red Knight", a Belgian comic), a villain tricks the hero into swearing an oath not to use his sword against him. The Red Knight, being The Fettered, is honor-bound to keep it, even when the villain eventually attacks. He circumvents it by giving his sword to his female sidekick, who is not bound by the oath and still carries a grudge against the villain for a Kick the Dog moment earlier in the album. The results are... messy.
• Subverted in an issue of Spider-Man, Spidey is riding on top of a car as it drives through New York (with the driver's consent). A cop pulls up next to them.

Spider-Man: Bet you a buck this isn't covered by traffic regulations. (Next panel, Spidey is holding a citation) Spider-Man: Huh. It is. Who knew?

• A Desperate Dan comic in The Dandy has him deliver a grand piano to a friend, so he oils the castors, gives it a push and "drives" it down a motorway. On passing a police car, one of the policemen comments that there is nothing in the rulebook about a piano needing an M.O.T.
• In Judge Dredd, the most popular Mayor of Mega City One was Dave the Orangutan -- put forward by the Judges in an apparent attempt to discredit democracy since there was no specific rule against it. He was so popular that after he was assassinated the post was abolished for ten years due to the public feeling that no one could replace him.
• Invoked by Scrooge McDuck in Don Rosa's story "The Guardians Of The Lost Library". Unfortunately for him, it doesn't work.

Referee: Are you nuts? You can't conduct an archeological excavation in the middle of a soccer championship! Scrooge: Oh, so? Show me that rule in the rulebook! Assistant: Gosh, he's right! It is allowed by the "King Tut" rule of 1922! Referee: No, the rule was voided after it resulted in a curse on whosoever dared enter the locker room!

• In Green Lantern, this is used by the rulemakers themselves. The Guardians sent a Green Lantern to a particularly nasty planet and he is almost immediately killed, so the Green Lantern sends his ring out to find a worthy successor. Enter Jack T. Chance. After "taking care" of a prominent threat on the planet, he is called back to Oa by the Guardians for discipline, but Jack says that he did what he had to do and would rather quit than be bound by the rules of the Guardians. The Guardians, lacking a suitable replacement for Jack, stated that a Green Lantern was not required to be a "nice sentient" and gave him back the ring with provisions that it could not be used outside of the planet Jack was stationed. The reason the Guardians were so annoyed with Chance was because of his own Loophole Abuse. Green Lantern Rings couldn't be used to make lethal attacks, so once Jack discovered this, he would use his ring to battle foes to the point of exhaustion - and then shoot them.
• As pictured above, various forms of Loophole Abuse crop up in FoxTrot. More examples can be found at that work's page.
• Used for laughs in the Young Justice No Mans Land special. Robin is depressed about being banned from helping Batman. Superboy points out that Bats never said anything about YJ steering clear of Gotham. So he and Impulse go on a ROAD TRIP!
• In Mega Man, the original six Robot Masters want to help Mega Man after his I Know You're in There Somewhere Fight, but they are programmed to destroy Mega Man. So they do...by destroying the Copy Robot.
• Lex Luthor once made a deal with Mxyzptlk where Mxy would provide Luthor with the means to render Superman powerless. Part of the deal was that Luthor must never tell Superman about Mxy's role in this. Not enjoying the idea of being unable to let Superman know how he defeated him, Luthor tried to circumvent that part of the deal by telling someone who would tell Superman about the deal. Luthor then told Clark Kent.
• In the fantasy comic strip Yamara, a toad familiar is tasked with bringing a newly-revived ex-vampire her first non-blood meal in centuries. The cleric forbids him from serving her meat, while another character threatens him with punishment if he offers her fruits or vegetables. His solution is to serve her cream of mushroom soup.
• In the story "Marriage Vows," in issue #15 of The Haunt of Fear, the heroine wanted to marry one Prince Dashing but was hampered by the fact that her father had promised her hand in marriage to the ruler of a neighboring kingdom in exchange for a big fat loan. Let's just say that she found a way to take that promise very literally...

Film

• In the film adaptation of Dick King Smith's Babe, Farmer Hogget plans to enter the titular character in a herding contest for dogs... despite Babe being a pig with an odd talent for sheepherding. He was concerned that the entry papers night say Name of Dog, because he couldn’t in good conscience put "Pig" down for that. The form, however, says Name of Entry. So Farmer Hogget is in the clear: it never asked you to specify that you were entering a dog.
• In Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End, Rules Lawyer Barbossa knows the pirate's code so damn well, he's able to pull this on Jack, even going as far as to tell Jack's Dad on him, who happens to be the Keeper of the Code and scary beyond all reason. Jack makes Barbossa regret this by pulling a dragon right back on him.
  • Barbossa uses and subverts this:

Barbossa: First of all, returning you to Port Royal was never part of our negotiations or agreement, so I must do nothing. Second, you have to be a pirate for the Pirate Code to apply, and you're not. And third... the Code is more a set of guidelines than what you'd call actual "rules".

• • • Like all good Rules Lawyer lawyers, Barbossa has no problem with the rules bending- as long as they bend in his favor.
  • Plus, his agreement to release Jack and Elizabeth...with no specification about when or where, so he just maroons them on an island.
• In ~Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan~ and the 2009 Star Trek film, the Kobayashi Maru test. Starfleet actually had to add a "no reprogramming the simulator" rule after Kirk's shot at it, and according to the Expanded Universe, this kicked off a whole tradition of loopholing the scenario.
  • Not only that, but it became an expectation of any student to find a way to beat the simulation with outside-the-box thinking.
• In the Swedish movie The Call-up, the protagonists (who are doing their military service) are out on exercise and need to drive back to base. The quickest way back is over a bridge, but the bridge has been declared destroyed (and everyone is supposed to play along, of course) and a guard refuses to let them pass. Their solution? They drive to a hardware store, buy some paint, and paint the words "Helicopter" on the truck. The guard can't stop them crossing that way.
• In The Dirty Dozen the named dozen are in war games when they switch their armbands to the other side's color and infiltrate their headquarters. When questioned on this tactic, they reply, "We're traitors".
• In Air Bud, there is apparently no rule against a dog playing basketball. Probably because no one ever thought that would come up ever.
  • Combination of Truth in Television with Did Not Do the Research. You would be hard-pressed to find a "the players have to be humans" rule. However, most schools have rules preventing pets from being taken onto the premises and rules governing the handling of live animal mascots. Bud would never have been allowed on the court, except perhaps for a half time stunt.
• In the movie Winning London, the Olsen twins have to save some "hostages" as part of a Model UN convention/competition. As it's all pretend, the hostages are just in the next room over, so they take the literal approach and climb through the air vents to save them. After coming back into the room, one boy shouts "You said we had to work it out on paper!", to which the official responds "No, I said you had to work it out."
• Subverted in Ratatouille: There Ain't No Rule saying a rat can't become a chef (in fact, the phrase "Anyone Can Cook" practically qualifies as Arc Words), but there is a rule that a rat can't be in a restaurant kitchen. Remy spends most of the film trying to be a chef without getting caught breaking the second rule; near the end of the film, the presence of Remy and his clan in the kitchen of Gusteau's still constitutes a health code violation that gets the restaurant closed down. Even that is just a temporary setback for Remy, as he and his (human) friends just open a bistro, where they presumably do a better job of hiding the rats.
• Flubber where the professor put flubber on the shoes of his school's basketball team when they are losing an important game. As a result, the team suddenly find themselves able to easily make impossibly high jumps to win the game. Although the coach of the opposing team protests this development, the stunned referee refuses to stop play because there is no rule that establishes a height limit of players' jumps, even though it is obvious this sudden advantage for the team appearing mid-game must be be the result of some kind of external aid that is likely against the rules.
• Semi-Pro: Ain't no rule says you can't play drunk. Well, there is a rule, but they can't enforce it. ("Remember those 30 free throws I did in Minnesota last year?" "Yeah?" "I don't.")
• In the movie Blades of Glory there ain't no rule saying two guys can't skate as a pairs team.
• In Zoom, in the final scenes of the movie as we see the 'Happy-Ever-After' scenes for each of the super-powered kids, we watch the expanding boy playing soccer as the goalie and being the team hero, as there Ain't No Rule against being able to expand your body parts to block the entire goal so no shots can go in.
• Shows up in the ending to Juwanna Mann, where a male basketball player is forced to play for a WNBA team, crossdressed, and wins the final game for them. He wins by making a slam dunk, which IS forbidden in WNBA rules. In fact, it was brought up earlier in the movie that he could NOT score using slam dunks. Which is a departure from real WNBA rules, which do not prohibit dunks. It's just that very few women can dunk on a 10-foot rim.
• Necessary Roughness and Waterboy. Ain't no rule that a man can't play football among boys! In Necessary Roughness, the rule is the NCAA eligibility rule, which states that a player begins his eligibility the day he first enrolls in college. So technically, though Blake was 34 years old, he's a "freshman" to the NCAA; he has three full years of eligibility remaining after the movie. A notable real-life example is Chris Weinke, who played six years of minor league baseball (for which he would not have been eligible to compete at the NCAA level) before enrolling ad Florida State and becoming a quarterback in football (for which he still was eligible.)
• In D2: The Mighty Ducks, the Ducks try on new uniforms (which were the uniforms of the just-created Anaheim Ducks, which in the timeline of the films were not yet invented) for the third period of the final game (they before had been Team USA). Despite the opposing coach's protests, the play-by-play announcer notes that he has "just been informed that there is no rule against changing uniforms during a game".
  • In many sports there actually isn't a rule about changing uniforms halfway through. Some teams raise money for charity by doing this and then auctioning off one set of uniforms after the game.
• Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid "Rules!? In a knife fight!? No rules!"
  • To be fair, even if there had been rules, Butch wouldn't have cheated in the knife fight. He cheated immediately before the knife fight.
• Subverted in ~Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby~. Not only is there a rule against getting out of the car and running, but they're both disqualified for it. Double subverted in that neither cares, and still count it as a moral victory for Ricky Bobby.
• In the 1986 film Lucas, scrawny 14-year old Lucas Bly takes advantage of a school district rule that says that school sports teams must allow any child with an interest to play in order to join the school football team in a misguided effort to impress the girl he is crushing on. The coach is reluctant, as Lucas can best be described as "scrawny", but it forced by the school district to let Lucas onto the team. The first time he actually plays, though, Lucas is injured so badly he requires hospitalization. There might not be a rule against scrawny runts joining a football team, but maybe there should be.
• Jason constantly does this to Kelly in Mystery Team.
• In Captain America the First Avenger during basic training a drill sargeant offer the recruits a challenge: if one of the recruits is able to get the flag from the top of a tall metal pole, he will be allowed to skip the rest of a training run. The pole is slippery and the recruits exhausted so the task seems impossible. Steve Rogers realizes that the instructor never mentioned actually climbing the pole so he simply waits for everyone else to give up, walks up to the pole and calmly removes the pin securing it to its base and lets the pole fall to the ground where he easily detaches the flag. It's one of the many Establishing Character Moments for the future Captain America.
• Several times in Fright Night 2011. Vampires can't enter residences without an invitation, but there's nothing against pretending to be delivery boys, attacking victims in abandoned houses or blowing their homes up.
• Done by Griphook in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 after he double crosses the trio during the raid on Bellatrix's vault at Gringotts.

Griphook: I said I'd get you in. I never said anything about letting you out!

• In Lord of War, the Interpol Agent pursuing Yuri accuses him of exploiting a loophole in international arms trading laws by shipping military vehicles and their armament seperately so they don't count as prohibited/embargoed heavy weapons.

Literature

• Honor Harrington: In “The Short Victorious War ” Harrington learns the reason Young was not removed from command after the events in “On Basilisk Station”. He used a loophole to give his return to the shipyard for repairs a legal basis. [[http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/17-Stormfromthe Shadows CD/The
• Dune: can be applied to using outlawed weapons, but is a legal gray/grey area.
• In Discworld, the Auditors, being the very Anthropomorphic Personifications of The Rules, are typically unable to break said Rules. As their goal is to exterminate all life, they usually have to find ways around them.
  • In Thief of Time, one Auditor who's assumed a human body finds she can overcome the compulsion to obey rules by declaring that certain things are "bloody stupid"; "bloody stupid" things can be safely ignored. This was written into the rules because regular auditors were paralyzed with indecision if confronted with a paradoxical statement, like a sign saying "Ignore this sign", or a sign next to an empty cage that says "do not feed the elephant".
  • At the climax of the book, the horsemen of the Apocalypse must ride out at the end of the world. No-one ever said against whom.
  • Susan's thought process in Soul Music, on the subject of leaving school without permission:

There's going to be trouble over this. ... I'm on the back of a horse a hundred feet up in the air, being taken somewhere mysterious that's a bit like a magic land with goblins and talking animals. There's only so much more trouble I could get into... Besides, is riding a flying horse against school rules? I bet it's not written down anywhere.

• • Likewise with Gnome Watch officer Buggy Swires; in a companion book, he is said to have a natural resistance to rules and authority. Even the unwritten rules like "Do not attempt to eat this Giraffe" or "don't kick people in the head because they won't give you a chip".
  • In Discworld, the laws of nature work like this; Ponder Stibbons has discovered that, like a busy local authority, the universe has failed to forbid a lot of things simply because it never occurred to it anyone would do them. The trick is to get things done before the universe rewrites the rulebook and pretends it was impossible all along. The breakthrough came with the invention of Hex, which can repeat the same spell several times a minute in minutely different ways, the universe making each one impossible just too late, allowing him to (for example) assemble the texts of books that haven't yet been written.
  • The climax of Unseen Academicals hinges on a long-forgotten, sometimes-derided football rule specifying that the first object handled by three consecutive players in a game shall be considered the ball. This, of course, allows the young hero to put his tin-can-kicking skills to brilliant use when the original game ball is "lost."
  • In the City Watch books there's a few loopholes in the traditional watchmen's oath, which requires new recruits to swear to "uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the city of Ankh-Morpork, serve the public trust, and defend the subjects of His/Her Majesty". As many fans have noticed, there's nothing in there about defending the ruler (just his/her subjects), and in Night Watch Vimes points out it doesn't say anything about following orders.
  • This trope is basically how the Librarian is able to keep his job at Unseen University, despite his transformation; There's no rule barring an orangutan from the college council, though the wizards had looked very hard for one.
    • This also enables him to read the Necrotelecomnicon (which caused a mage that tried to read it to disappear and the book was noticeably thicker after the incident) without harm.
  • While acting as the title Hogfather, Death saved the life of a girl destined to die and responded calmly when Albert protested it was against the rules for Death to do such.

The Hogfather can. The Hogfather gives presents. There's no better present than a future.

• In The Zucchini Warriors by Gordon Korman, Cathy from the girls' boarding school across the street pulls a Sweet Polly Oliver and serves as quarterback, leading the team to victory. Naturally, once it's found out, the team coach attempts to argue that girls can too play football (despite having said in a prior interview that they can't). The referee shuts this down by pointing out that, as this is the Macdonald Hall football team and Cathy is not a student there, she's not eligible to play.
• In one of the Dinotopia books (Lost City), the newcomers to the lost Troodon warrior haven of Halcyon are challenged to complete either an underground maze or an obstacle course against one of the residents. The rules of the obstacle course are, simply, to get from one end to the other before the opponent completes his own course... but the honor-bound saurians had never previously considered the strategy of avoiding all of the obstacles and running down the empty ground between the two courses...
  • In the same book, two high-ranking officials play an entirely oral wargame, declaring what they order their troops and what not. It eventually gets down to the generals preparing to go one on one on a bridge. Then the villains claims the Kraken rises up from the water and grabs his opponent. In retaliation his opponent declares That the Kraken isn't a bloodthirsty monster, but just wants a friend. The Judges declare it legal, and the villain loses.
• In The False Mirror, Ranji-aar's team was going through a large maze and discovered that the other team had bribed people, and had learned the route. So they made a ladder to get up on top of the walls, away from all the obstacles, and fake environmental dangers. Needless to say they won.
• ~Ender's Game~. Ender is faced with a horribly unbalanced game against two teams at once. Ender wins due to the victory condition just being opening the enemy's gate, without bothering to actually fight the enemy soldiers.
  • This was very deliberately done, a big deal is later made about war having no rules, and anything you can do to win is what you should do. (Apparently a war to extinction against aliens has no Geneva Convention). Later, while he's playing a simulation in which he was leading a campaign against the Buggers, the final confrontation gave him only a few, old ships against the Buggers' home planet surrounded by warships. He blows up the planet. And then it wasn't a simulation after all...
• One of the final exams in Robin Hobb's Shamans Crossing is a test of bridge construction. Turns out the actual test was simply "get your team across this river", which is most easily done by making them all swim. Nobody said making a bridge was mandatory.
  • Also happens near the end of her Fool's Fate, though in that case, the only thing saved was Dutiful's honor, as he had already broken his promise, made rather under duress, to kill a dragon - he instead set it free. Then someone realized his actual promise had only been to deliver the dragon's head to his betrothed's house - he had never promised it had to stay there, nor that it couldn't still be attached to said dragon. And thus, his promise was technically fulfilled.
• In The Lives of Christopher Chant, in order to rescue his friend Tacroy, Christopher has to find Tacroy's soul and claim it from the Priest-King (the Dright) who rules Tacroy's home dimension and owns everyone in it. When Christopher does see the soul, it immediately becomes much farther away from him. When Christopher claims the Sept is cheating, he casually points out that "I named no rules." At which point Christopher and Millie follow suit, because if there's no rule to say the Sept can't use magic to interfere, then there's no rule to say they can't use their magic to stop him interfering.
  • Immediately after this, the Dright asks for one of Christopher's lives in return for Tacroy's soul, but Christopher realizes that this will grant the Dright control over him. Chistopher thus gives the Dright one of his lives and immediately sets it on fire. (Of course, it did hurt a bit.)
• In the children's novel Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary, Ralph's human friend, having discovered Ralph and his comparatively impressive intellect, decides to bring him to school for show and tell. The children decide to test his smarts by putting him in a maze with some food at the end and seeing how long it took him to get to the food. Ralph decides that the whole thing is stupid, climbs up the wall, and runs along the top of the maze to get to the food quicker. The children call loophole abuse, but instead of forcing the issue by covering the maze, they just put him back at the beginning, allowing Ralph to repeat his stunt over and over until the children get fed up and declare that, far from being smart, Ralph is too stupid to complete the maze by following the rules. Ralph and his human friend find this an unfair assessment, since they asked Ralph to get to the food as quick as possible and Ralph delivered repeatedly.
• In Harry Potter:
  • Deathly Hallows, the protagonists attempt this in order to avoid having to give Gryffindor's sword to Griphook. It doesn't work. Also, the Elder Wand has passed from hand to hand when the previous owner is killed. Voldemort assumes that this is the only way to gain control of it. It's not.
    • More specifically, it's only necessary to defeat/disarm the previous owner. Voldemort assumed that the Elder Wand had "passed to" Snape when he killed Dumbledore, but Malfoy disarmed him first, and when Harry later defeated Malfoy, the Elder Wand recognized him as its master.
    • Even more specifically, ownership is passed only when the current owner is 'defeated/disarmed'. Dying without either of those conditions being met or arranging for one's suicide, even by help of another, means there is no transfer of ownership of the wand and its true power dies with the last owner. Dumbledore knew this, hence why he arranged his Mercy Killing with Snape. Malfoy was simply a Spanner in The Works in that regard.
  • In Chamber of Secrets, it's revealed that Arthur Weasley works in the Misuse Of Muggle Artifacts Office, but abuses Muggle artifacts on his own time. He purposefully wrote a loophole into the law in order to get away with this, namely it is misuse to use said object to harm or mislead a muggle. Personal experimentation in one's own home is another matter all together.
  • Quidditch is a stunning aversion to this trope, having a rule for literally everything. As just one example, there's a rule that forbids using a battle axe in play. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For added hilarity, according to Quidditch Through the Ages, these rules actually arose because of this trope.
  • In Goblet of Fire, the rules for the first contest states that contestants can only bring a wand to face the dragons, but not that they can't use it to summon whatever else they need. Harry uses that loophole to summon his Firebolt flying broomstick.
• The Wheel of Time series:
  • Aes Sedai are bound by the Oath Rod "to speak no word that is not true," but the Oath Rod defines "true" as "what the speaker believes." Thus, an Aes Sedai who believes a lie can tell it as if it were the truth, and the Aes Sedai are experts at using this and other Loophole Abuses to twist the truth beyond recognition.
    • The third Oath "Never use the One Power as a weapon, except ... to save her own life, or her Warder's, or the life of another sister " can be circumvented by an Aes Sedai intentionally placing herself (or, presumably her Warder or another sister) in danger.
      • The danger has to be real and fatal, though (or at least the sister has to believe it is), meaning they can't exactly use this loophole to shatter armies with impunity the way they could without the Oath. The spirit of the law is upheld.
  • In The Gathering Storm, it is revealed that one of the oaths the Black Ajah swears to the Dark One is "I swear not to reveal the Black Ajah or its secrets until the hour of my death." One recruit forcibly drafted into the Black Ajah learns everything she can about its members, leaders, plans, and prophecies, then proceeds to betray it to Egwene by taking poison first. One would think the Dark One would close this loophole, but as Egwene herself says, "What kind of Darkfriend would kill themselves in order to advance the greater good? It doesn't seem the kind of thing his followers would consider."
  • Under Tower Law the Amyrlin must be Aes Sedai, but you don't have to be Aes Sedai to become Amyrlin. Thus, raising Egwene as Amyrlin makes her legally Aes Sedai without having to raise her as Aes Sedai. For even more bonus points, they wouldn't legally have been able to raise any regular Aes Sedai without an Amyrlin.
  • The Eelfinn did this to Mat, when he unwittingly made his Three Wishes to them: "Wise to ask leavetaking when no terms were set, yet unwise not to set the terms. We will set the terms..."
    • Mat's foxhead medallion worked on a big loophole (proving the Eelfinn would have had a ball with D&D wishes) in that he was free of the One Power , in that the threads melts when they touched him directly, but if you picked up a pile of dung, for example, and threw it at him with the power, it still worked.
    • Mat, sadly, didn't learn his lesson well enough: in Towers of Midnight, he carefully binds the Eelfinn in a promise not to attack his party. Then there's a solid Oh Crap moment when the packs of armed Aelfinn show up to block the way out.
• Artemis Fowl: Holly Short's final test at the police academy was an Unwinnable Training Simulation where she was facing an insurmountable number of virtual enemies. She fired at the projector instead.
  • Also in the first book, when she interprets a cry for help from someone who has no idea she's there as an "invitation" enabling her to enter a human building. She has to argue over this to her commander later, when she states that there is actually precedent for it.
  • Or in the third book, when joking (and unsuspecting) permission for Juliet to bring her "invisible friend" is also used as an invitation.
    • Earlier than that, even - when Artemis allows himself to be captured, Spiro gives him a tour of the building's security system to show him just how screwed he is. Artemis jokingly says he could beat the security with the help of his fairy friends. Spiro tells him he can bring in all the fairy friends he wants. Oops.
  • In the first book, Artemis makes the mistake of saying that no fairy may enter his house while he's alive. Of course, the fairies try to kill him first. And that's exactly what he wanted.
  • In the prequel story, LEPrecon, which shows how Holly got into the LEP. Her test is interupted by Turnball Root, and it ends up at a point where Commander Root and Trouble Kelp are locked inside a human dwelling. Holly can't go in to save them, so she gets the ship and tears the house down. You can't get dwelling sickness if there's no dwelling!
    • Also:

Root: You tag me before I tag you, and you're in. No questions asked.

• Redwall: Matthias, at the top of a bell tower, promises Big Bad Cluny he'll come down if Cluny releases his hostage. Ain't no rule that Matthias couldn't cut down the giant bell, which Cluny is directly under, before coming down.
• Part of the backstory of David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series is that the United States had severe arms limitations imposed on it after the last world war. There was no such restriction on weapons research. Therefore, the U.S. funneled tons of money into advanced weapon design programs and built modular factories that could be turned to war production with the flip of a switch.
• In the second Flat Stanley book, Stanley ends up being used as a sail in a boat race. A judge is heard saying that it is not against the rules to use your teammate as a sail.
• The Kid Who Ran For Principal by Judy K. Morris. Ain't no rule that says a student can't run for interim principal for the purpose of firing an ineffective and cruel teacher.
• In the Thursday Next novel Something Rotten, Aint no rule saying a genetically re-engineered Neanderthal can't play croquet although it was in dispute; there are rules saying non-humans can't. The rule that non-humans cannot play croquet would normally have prevented him from playing, but the reconstruction involved using some human genes for the vocal cords. As a result of the small percent of human DNA, he wasn't technically non-human, so they let him play.
  • In the Next-World's version of croquet, finding loopholes in the rules is an expected part of gameplay and heartily enjoyed by the fans.
• L Sprague De Camp:
  • In the short story "Nothing in the Rules", one team at a girls' swimming competition contains a mermaid, who of course wins everything. In response to the opposition's outrage, the team coach points out that the rules only specify that all entrants must be female; nothing is said about species. The officials are reluctantly forced to admit that he's right. Whereupon the opposing coach visits the city zoo and borrows a female seal, who (properly incentivized with a bucket of fish) outswims the mermaid. To avoid disqualification for not using the proper swimming form, the mermaid only competes in the freestyle events.
  • In Throwback a genetically recreated prehistoric human becomes a football player. In this case any "humans only" rules don't apply because before the story began the recreated cavemen fought for their civil rights and were legally recognized as people, even though they are technically not the same species as most humans.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, it is a frequently cited legal precedent that there ain't no rule a horse can't be a count's heir (or at least, there wasn't in Lord Midnight Vortala's time). If a horse's ass can be a Count, why not the whole horse? On the other hand, there Ain't No Rule against a Count hiring 2000 chefs, equipping them with Chef's knives and sending them after his enemies (Each Count can only legally have 20 of his own troops, total). The Emperor was not amused.
  • The POW camp in the short story Borders of Infinity applied this trope in a rather nasty manner. So many square meters per inmate? An opaque, luminous force shield encloses that much open ground and field latrines. No periods of darkness for over twelve hours? No darkness at all, ever. Water? Everyone gets a cup along with their clothes and a bedroll (the taps by the latrines work most of the time). Access to medical personnel? Plenty of medics mixed in with the general population, but they mentioned nothing about equipment. Food? A pile of ICRC-equivalent compliant ration bars (one per inmate) appear at a random location on the camp perimeter twice per day. No solitary confinement for more than 24 hours? <insert bitter laughter here> No beatings or rapes by guards? No guards....
• Ain't no rule that a chicken can't be mayor. This one is from the book Herb Seasoning by Julian Thompson. Said chicken actually understands English and can write in (no pun intended) chicken scratch, but she's really being used as a figurehead for a conman. Long story, just read the book. Oh, and there Ain't No Rule that says the cure for depression can't be a mixture of eel slime and aspirin. Applied topically, of course.
• Used in Robert Asprin's Phules Company, when the company competes on an obstacle course against the elite Red Eagles. The race specifies "full combat gear and conditions," and the Eagles make good time navigating the obstacles in heavy packs with loaded weapons. Then on their turn, Phule's company blows up the obstacles, and sprints straight through in record time. Some Eagles complain that this is cheating, but their own commander agrees that in "combat conditions," you're not worried about being polite to the landscape.
• Tom Fitzgerald is fond of this one. In The Great Brain series:
  • In book four, he challenges a classmate to find a rule in the Bible or the catechism that forbids having all the candy one wants in a Catholic school. (Uh, any number of verses regarding overindulgence or gluttony like Proverbs 23:20-21? The 4th commandment+parents passing on some measure of authority to the school they choose to send you to?)
  • In book five, he bets Sweyn that he can catch a bigger trout with a pole, line, hook, and worm bait, than Sweyn can with his rod, reel, and fly hooks. Then he tells J.D. that there ain't no rule against setting up six poles at once.
  • In book seven, he bets that Parley Benson's quarter horse can't beat Sweyn's mustang in a mile race. He wins this bet easily since Parley's horse hasn't the stamina, then proposes to give the kids a chance to win their money back by swapping horses and racing again. When he wins on the other horse, the kids accuse him of cheating, and he tells them that there ain't no rule against slowing a horse to let it get its wind, and that if Parley had done it, they certainly wouldn't have complained.
• In The Dresden Files Harry makes a deal with Mab to perform three services for her, but reserves the right to refuse to do any specific service she names, and the agreement that she won't use her powers against him for refusing to accept. However, she can always manipulate him into it in other ways. Oh, and she can still hurt him out of spite.
  • Loophole abuse is also the reason Harry is very careful with the boon he received from the Summer Court. While he's being hunted by the gruffs, he considers using said boon to get them off his case, but then reconsiders; after all, if he asks Summer to protect him from their own assassins, they could easily break his back and dump him in a hospital so he won't be a threat that Summer needs to fight anymore.
  • In Dead Beat, he gets away with necromancy because technically the Fifth Law of Magic only applies to human dead, not Tyrannosaurs. It probably helped that it was both necessary to saving the world and downright awe-inspiring.
  • On the subject of Mab, fairies are all about loophole abuse. For fairies, there is no such thing as the spirit of the agreement; if it's not explicitly outlined in the letter of the agreement, it's fair game. For this reason bargains with fairies must be considered very carefully. On the plus side, since the Unseelie Accords were written by fairies, many of whom had conflicting interests, they're pretty much airtight.
  • Harry loves Loophole Abuse. He can't use magic to kill, so instead he uses magic to annoy, making the less even-tempered spellslinger he's facing burn down his own house while still inside. When being chased by increasingly powerful assassins sent by Summer, which owes him a boon, he discovers that they can only hunt him until the dawn, and so requests a donut. And not a magicked donut, but a fresh donut. With sprinkles. Naturally, it takes a while to find, at least until morning since there are no donut stores open at night. In the most recent novel, he's told only crazy ghosts can become corporeal and interact with the real world, and quickly realizes that the actions he takes, the things he does, marks him as more than slightly unhinged. Welcome to the real world, ghost Harry!
• In the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog, the Soviets refuse to shut down their Kavaznya laser Cannon, claiming that the previous strategic arms treaties said nothing about ground-based laser systems. In Shadows of Steel it is said that while the USSR and China signed arms control treaties against selling to Iran, none of the other post-Soviet states did.
• In The Guardians, there ain't no rule that a Guardian can't become human, exercise human rights, and become a Guardian again. And they gain a second Gift upon their second self-sacrifice, which is why Michael has so many Gifts.
• The land of Xanth has a law stating that the king must be an adult Magician and forbidding ruling queens. However, in one book an enemy is incapacitating kings one after another and they're running out of Magicians... until one of the heroes decides that if a Sorceress is really just a female Magician, there's no rule that they can't have a female king.
• This is how the Obstructive Bureaucrats of the Solarian League in Honor Harrington gained power: Their constitution gave every member nation of the League veto power over statutes... but not over regulations, which is what the bureaucrats used.
• Count Olaf of A Series of Unfortunate Events plans to marry his ward Violet to get at her inheritance. (And, it is strongly implied, some other things.) She's underage, so the marriage has to be approved by her parent or guardian. In this case, that would be Count Olaf. He stages the marriage in the guise of a play about a wedding, even tricking a judge into performing the ceremony, with the audience as witnesses. Violet takes advantage of a loophole herself; the law states she has to sign the marriage license in "her own hand". She's right-handed, so she simply uses her left hand, making the marriage null and void.
  • The film version plays out slightly differently. Olaf caught the kids reading law books earlier in the film, and thus catches Violet's trick. After the contract is signed, he gloats about it. When Poe demands Olaf be arrested, the Baliff says, awkwardly, that the wedding was perfectly legal. Then Klaus uses the same device Olaf used to kill the Baudelaire parents to set the contract on fire. The audience then arrests Olaf.
• In her 500 Kingdoms novel Fortune's Fool, Mercedes Lackey uses an ifrit as the villain. At the end, the ifrit is bound into his bottle. But the bottle cannot be sealed permanently; there must be a release condition, and it must be possible, however unlikely. So the ifrit is bound into the bottle "until you repent and reform and join the ranks of the Lawful Jinn of the City of Brass!" Geniekind have free will, he can choose between good and evil.
• In the novel Citadel, a junior welder places a fake spider in the work sled of a hated coworker shortly before he goes out on EVA. When questioned about it, it is pointed out that there are regulations about tampering with a coworker's spacesuit, but not about the sleds. It is strongly implied that the safety regulations in question are rewritten after that incident.
• A children's picture book actually has this as a plot point. A child is playing outside this apartment complex, and loses a toy to the other side of the road. (Either a plane or a ball) Since he had been forbidden to cross the street by himself, he tries to ask passing adults to escort him across the street but nobody does anything. Finally, he decides to climb up some objects such as a tree, then his weight causes the top of the tree to lean, allowing him to grab the tree on the other side of the road, where he picked up his toy and threw it back across the street, and repeated the proces to get back across. His reasoning for doing this was because he didn't actually set foot on the street, and he was forbidden from walking across the street without an escort - his mother had not told him he couldn't find another creative way across.
• In the novel Vampire High, a group of vampire students decide to join the water-polo team and take their school to its first-ever victory...and then it turns out that these students have a strange and rare gene that lets them become seal-human hybrids when in the water. With their enhanced strength and speed, they win the game by a two-hundred point margin, and a group of lawyers present protest, saying that the rules state only a human can play on the team. The protagonist's father tells them that "The law hasn't quite decided what is and is not human," and points out that there were other vampires on the team who didn't have the gene, and no one had complained. The lawyers persist, however, until the protagonist's father tells them he's a lawyer in a VERY powerful and influential firm, and the guys back off.
• In the Dune universe, there is a major prohibition against using nuclear weapons against human targets. Just before the final battle, Muad'Dib uses a nuke to blow a hole in the a large rock formation so his army can pass through. He points out that no humans were killed by the nuke.
• In The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the Pevensies justify wearing fur coats that don't belong to them on their foray into another, wintery world, on the grounds that they won't even be taking them out of the wardrobe.
• In the Clock Punk fantasy Goblin Moon, a friend of the heroine's aunt marries a criminal she's never met, just before he is executed for his crimes. She does this because she owes her creditors a fortune, which automatically become her husband's problem as soon as she weds him; as an instant widow, she's free of her debts and can go on to marry the man she actually loves. All the criminal gets out of it is the company of a prostitute and a bottle of wine for his last night, courtesy of a well-bribed jailer.
• In the first Red Dwarf Book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, it is explained that after the advent of genetic modification, specially created athletes were designed for their league games with their entire bodies suited for their role - twelve foot basketball players, boxers with heads of unthinking muscle and so on. One football (soccer) team fielded a goalie which was basically a massive oblong block of flesh that filled the entire goal mouth. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.
• The alien race in Tom Holt's Falling Sideways have a very clear rule about Thou Shalt Not Kill. They do not have a very clear rule about Thou Shalt Not Make People Believe Themselves To Be Frogs And Therefore Starve To Death On An Unsuitable Diet.
• According to Captain Bartleby in 1636: The Saxon Uprising, there's no rule that the Dollar is the exclusive currency of the USE, allowing the Third Division the capability to produce its own currency for purchasing supplies.
• In Animorphs, to prevent the destruction of the galaxy that will be inevitable should they come to direct blows, the Ellimist and the Crayak set a bunch of rules for themselves in how to resolve their conflict... and then find as many loopholes as they possibly can. The Ellimist isn't allowed to directly save all humans from the Yeerks, but can take a small sampling of them and relocate them on another planet? Show the world's anti-Yeerk heroes a possible future to encourage them to agree to relocation... but give them a massive hint for how they can score a decisive victory over the Yeerks in the process. The Crayak's lackey, the Drode, isn't allowed to kill any sentient life? Set the self-destruct sequence on a bunch of robots (robots aren't alive!) to draw his targets into a situation likely (but not guaranteed) to kill them.
• In a Berenstein Bears novel, the new principal puts in a school dress code. They proceed to piss him off on the very first day it's in effect by doing just this. Among these are wearing green jeans instead of blue jeans, and wearing a Batman cape instead of a Superman cape.
• In the Safehold series by David Weber, the heroes relentlessly exploit loopholes and creative interpretations of the religious prohibitions concerning technological advances.
  • One of the more notable examples of outright abuse comes with explosives and chemistry: the "archangels" who created the rules couldn't explain why certain things shouldn't be done (since that would expose people to too much knowledge), only saying that mixing chemicals X and Y would result in dangerous, magical retribution. If, however, you wanted that "magical retribution" to occur in certain controlled conditions, say in a fuse attached to a gunpowder-filled artillery shell...
  • Gets even better when one of the people directly responsible for enforcing the restrictions gets brought in on the secret (namely that the religion in question is a Path of Inspiration) and starts helping the heroes abuse loopholes. Naturally having shot down attempts at loophole abuse in the past, he's well familiar with how that game is played.
• In Fate Zero, Kiritsugu signs a Magically Binding Contract with Lord El-Melloi - El-Melloi will order Lancer to commit suicide and withdraw from the Holy Grail War, and in exchange Kiritsugu cannot harm him or his fiance. As soon as Lancer is dead, Kiritsugu's assistant shoots El-Melloi.
  • Kiritsugu again: Aint No Rule that the Einzbern Master has to be an Einzbern, or that a Master has to be the one who supports his Servant.
  • The Black Knight's swordplay is so practiced that he can perform even his most advanced techniques instinctually, represented by the "Eternal Arms Mastership" ability. This allows him to ignore the mental restrictions of his Berserker class completely, while keeping the improved stats.
• Isaac Asimov: The Robot stories are basically a study in Loophole Abuse. Robots must obey the Three Laws, but many of the stories place a Robot in a situation where strict adherence to the Three Laws is impossible, and so the Robot must engage in some judicious moral wrangling to reach a resolution. Sometimes it boils down to a "spirit of the law" versus "letter of the law" situation. Other times it involves situational interpretation of the Laws (ie, a Robot cannot harm a human, but what constitutes "harm?" Does social embarassment count as "harm?" etc.) Chronologically later stories involve the creation of a "Zeroth Law," and introduces the concept of the "Greater Good" into the Robots' morality.
• In John C Wright's Count to a Trillion, Menelaus tries a nutty, very hypothetical, and dangerous experiment as soon as the shuttle leaves Earth -- meaning he's no longer covered by Earth law, and not yet under the captain's authority on the ship. Reaction to this reasoning: they knew they shouldn't have brought along a lawyer.

Live Action TV

• In the Swedish version of Survivor, there was once a contest of sack racing. The production crew had bound coconuts in the water to the bottom of the sea close to the beach, and the presenter told the participants that they had to sack race to closest coconut, round it, and then return and the first to return should win. One participant reacted by rounding a coconut that laid under the closest palm tree and wasn't prepared by the crew. He got a special prize for creativity.
• From the American version of Survivor:
  • Aint No Rule stating you couldn't look at another contestant's board during certain puzzle challenges.
  • Aint No Rule stating you couldn't bribe other contestants.
  • Aint No Rule stating you can't accidentally wander into another tribe's camp
  • Aint No Rule stating you can't use somebody's eyeglasses and water to start fire.
  • Early in the show, someone had apparently broke a pair of binoculars they brought as their luxury item and used them to start fire. Then another time, someone apparently smuggled a granola bar into the game through their luxury item. Another time, someone brought a flag that was used as a tarp (That was confiscated) Rules have been put up for Luxury items since.
  • Aint No Rule stating you can't use the other camp's fire to start your own.
  • A few seasons of Survivor have started off with a "Grab supplies as fast as you can"-portion. There Aint No Rule stating you can't steal the other tribe's stuff when they're not looking.
  • Aint No Rule stating you can't offer up items as a trade for fire with the other tribe.
• Mythbusters competitions sometimes feature Loophole Abuse.
  • Jamie's egg drop from the roof of M5 is a classic. He converted his materials to a line to lower the egg with.
  • Adam justifying going over-budget on his hovercraft was also good (his finished product was within budget, but his total spending wasn't).
  • In another episode they had to use salsa (the dressing, not the music) to cut through the bar of a jail cell. As part of the myth they were allowed to speed up the electrolysis by running the current from a lightbulb through it. Jamie used a small radio (a device commonly used by the interns of many Mexican prisons) to change the current from AC to DC on the wire. His excuse being he got the radio for "good behavior."
    • This escalated to Adam "stealing" a prison vacuum engine and building a makeshift drill that ultimately failed.
  • For a ninja myth, Kari, Tory, and Grant competed to make the most accurate blowgun using "natural" materials such as bamboo. Since copper is a "naturally"-occuring element, Kari chose to put a length of copper pipe down the center of her bamboo tube. Needless to say, she won.
  • "I'm not doing anything <X> wouldn't have done, if <X> had had power tools!"
  • It should be noted that for every time they do abuse loopholes, they'll just as equally acknowledge and then subvert them by ignoring them, claiming what they call "the spirit of the myth". For example, during the myth that a piece of paper couldn't be folded more than 7 times, Grant got 8 folds by folding lengthwise as much as he could, then widthwise. Tory then took it one step beyond, since the myth didn't say in half. When it came time to do the myth for real though, they all agreed that the spirit was folding in half lengthwise, then widthwise, and repeating.
• In Lost's fifth season finale, two mysterious characters are revealed to be pulling the strings behind certain events, effectively a battle of the Chessmasters. In the opening scene (set in the 1800s) one tells the other that he will one day find a loophole that will "allow me to kill you." In 2007, the Man in Black, aka the Smoke Monster succeeds in killing (or rather, convincing Ben to kill)Jacob, the leader of the Island and prior to his death, Jacob remarks that "I see you found your loophole."
• In the pilot episode for White Collar, Neal breaks his house arrest restrictions and flees to a criminal's hideout, knowing full well that the FBI can track him with GPS. When the FBI arrives to "arrest" Neal, they arrest the other criminals as well due to a clause in search and seizure law that states law enforcement has the power to confiscate evidence of criminal activity while pursuing a fugitive, even if said crimes are completely unrelated.
• Firefly: When the resident minister shows up for a fight toting a rifle, he states that while the Good Book has some quite specific things to say about killing, it's a mite fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.
• In The Sarah Connor Chronicles Cameron is specifically ordered by Sarah not to kill two people who may be a lead to Skynet. When they're later murdered by gangsters, within earshot of Cameron, she nonchalantly points out to Sarah that saving them wasn't an order.
• Doctor Who: In the Fourth Doctor episode "The Deadly Assassin", The Doctor is accused of killing the Lord President of Gallifrey, the punishment for which is execution. However, the president had not named a successor before he was killed so an election must be held. So to put off his execution long enough to figure out what's really going on, the Doctor invokes some obscure law that lets him submit himself as a candidate so the Time Lords can't execute him until after the election.
• On Family Matters, Steve Urkel challenges Laura's Guy of the Week to a contest to see who can climb to the top of a rope faster. The loser has to stay away from Laura forever. Steve is absolutely terrible at rope climbing, but he wins because there Ain't No Rule that says he can't use a rocket pack to fly to the top instead of climbing in the usual way. This is quite ridiculous as a way of winning a rope-climbing contest, because, well, it's not rope climbing! The guy in question never appears again, but a generous interpretation would claim that he just faded into the background like every other girl/guy of the week, and didn't stay away because he actually honored Steve Urkel's beating him in the contest. On the other hand, as a result of the jetpack, Urkel ended up in a Step By Step Crossover, a fate far worse than being dumped.
• In Babylon 5, Ivanova becomes the Green Drazi leader by grabbing the former leader's ceremonial sash:

Ivanova: You're saying just because I'm holding this right now, I'm Green leader? But I'm human! Green Drazi: Rules of combat older than contact with other races. Did not mention aliens. (looks embarrassed) Rules change... caught up in committee. Not come through yet.

• • Also, Sinclair's abuse of the Rush Act, which authorizes him to use any and all military assets to end a strike by the station's dockworkers. He uses those "assets" -- namely, funds earmarked for the military budget -- to pay for the safety upgrades which the workers demanded.
• On The Brady Bunch, Marcia joins Greg's Boy Scout troop because there Ain't No Rule that says a girl can't be a Boy Scout. Greg tries to retaliate by joining Marcia's Sunflower Girls Group, but he is prevented because in his case, there is a rule -- not against boys joining the group, but because there is an age limit which he is too old for. Instead, he gets younger brother Peter to join.
  • At the time, there most definitely was a rule that said a girl can't be a Boy Scout. They were allowed to be Explorers starting in the early 1970s, so it's possible that Marcia joined Greg's Explorer post, but technically she couldn't have joined his Boy Scout Troop.
• Similarly, on My Three Sons, Chip once joined the girls' field hockey team (in retaliation for a girl attempting to join the track team.) There Wasn't No Rule preventing this, but there was a rule about uniforms, which forced Chip to play wearing a skirt, at which point Hilarity Ensued. The conflict was ultimately resolved by Chip unexpectedly turning out to be a lousy field hockey player compared to the more experienced girls, and Learning a Valuable Lesson.
• One episode of The Twilight Zone has a coach putting a robot on his baseball team as the pitcher - ain't no rule against that. But then the team doctor informs him that the rules do say a baseball team consists of "nine men". Trying to correct this by giving the robot a heart ruins it.
• Strangers With Candy: Ain't no rule that says a participant in the father-student sack race can't be the cremated remains of the student's father in an urn. There * is* a rule that states "50% or more of the daddy must pass the finish line;" unfortunately for Jerri, at least 75% of her father's ashes had spilled out while she raced.
• On I Carly There's no rule that specifically states that a full-grown adult can't wrestle in a community wrestling league. The pamphlet only recommended the activity to boys 6-10.
  • This also doesn't stop Sam from challenging the Jerkass doing so and beating him.
  • Another incident has Gibby show there wasn't any rule requiring him to wear a shirt at school. Funnily enough, they do have one against wearing turtleneck sweaters.
  • Having gone to law school (for three days), Spencer is an expert at finding loopholes:
    • After Nevel trapped iCarly in being forced to get him a new car they couldn't afford, Spencer finds a loophole in the FCC's definition of a new car as a 'unique vehicle that's never been state registered and can go up to 25 miles per hour under its own power'. He modifies the replica star cruiser he got off the internet to be able to move under its own power. Because its unique (one of the kind), has never been state registered, and can go up to 25 miles an hour (proven when Nevel tries to drive it and destroys a flower shop), it technically counts as a new car.
    • When Sam gets them in legal trouble for getting money off children online, Spencer discovers they can legally keep the money if they give a product or service in return, and he just so happens to be selling fudgeballs for the Sunshine Girls.
    • When the gang is forced to talk about a terrible (and dangerous) line of shoes in a positive way which is enraging their fanbase, Spencer finds a loophole, they have to be talking about them in a positive way, doesn't say they can't reveal the faults of the shoe so long as they do it in a 'positive way'.
• In one episode of My Name Is Earl, Joy enters a mother-daughter beauty pageant. Ain't no rule that her mother has to be alive.
• Classic Professional Wrestling trope. The most obvious is the loophole that a title (usually) can't change hands unless the victory is 'clean'; if a heel were to, say, disqualify himself by hitting an opponent (restrained by his allies) in the groin with a foreign object while outside the ring over ten seconds (are there any other rules I'm forgetting?), he'd retain it. And then there's the classic No Holds Barred/Street Fight/Hardcore match, where there Ain't No Rules. Aside from 'win via pinfall or submission', of course.
  • As with so many other things, Eddie Guerrero was the master of this. While the ref was distracted, he would grab a chair, hit it against something to make a noise, throw it to his opponent, and then lay down. The ref would reach the logical conclusion, and DQ his opponent. Ain't no rule against giving your opponent a weapon.
• Michael Larson managed to take home $110,000 in winnings on Press Your Luck by finding and exploiting a flaw in the way in the game worked. By freeze-framing videotapes of the show and memorizing the patterns in which the light moved around the board, Larson was able to time his buzzer presses so that they always stopped on the most advantageous squares. CBS protested, but in the end, they were forced to give Larson the money because even though his win was far from kosher, nothing he did was technically against the rules. However, they promptly reprogrammed the board to make this stunt significantly harder to replicate.
• The Colbert Report: In a segment of Formidable Opponent where Stephen debates himself one of the Stephens argue that torture is constitutional. The constitution might forbid cruel and unusual punishment but that's not a problem according to Stephen if torture is used so often it is no longer unusual.
• BBC proto-Reality TV show Now Get Out of That featured this as part of the challenges themselves, which were sometimes worded very specifically to allow this.
• One Saturday Night Live parody of lawyer commercials featuring Dana Carvey was base on this trope:

Carvey: (wearing enormous, obvious hearing aids) "Attorney Dave Miller got me ten million dollars after he told me to ram this piece of spaghetti through my ear drums. The box didn't say not to! Thanks, Dave Miller!"

• On The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the dress code at the prep school Will and Carlton attend says that students must wear the school blazer and a tie tied in a double Windsor knot. However, the rule does not state that the tie cannot be worn on one's head. It also says nothing about sewing bright red lining into the blazer and wearing it inside out. Will does both.
  • The lining was already in the blazer, he merely turned said blazer inside out. Getting away with it caused several other students to follow suit.
• Lampshaded in the ESPN Sports Science episode about hockey goalies: while there Ain't No Rule about what size the goalie can be, even the fattest man in the world wouldn't be able to take up enough space to block the entire goal, and even average hockey players can get pucks into the spaces that he leaves open.
  • There is actually a rule that would prevent such a player from being a goalie: the rule about how large a jersey can be (and that you must wear one).
• The detectives of Law and Order Special Victims Unit once raided a place selling mail-order "used Homecoming Queen undergarments". The Homecoming Queens in question were senior citizens, and making a bundle. They didn't say that the undergarments belonged to young girls, after all.
• Apparently, in Glee there Ain't No Rule against a wheelchair user being bowled down the field like a human cannonball in football. This may well not actually be true in Real Life.
• In Supernatural, angels must get permission to inhabit a person's body. Unfortunately, there's no rule against torturing people and their loved ones in order to get permission.
• In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Witches Council rules seem to be made for this. They even have a rule that says "There's always a loophole."
• The Drew Carey Show had an episode where the four protagonists were arrested and forced by the court to stay away from each other starting from when they left the courthouse. Oswald then decided that they should just stay in the courthouse. This trope was then subverted when the judge changed their wording to "immediately.
• In the prologue of a Malcolm in the Middle episode, Malcolm and Reese were playing football in the house until their mother told them not to. They then started throwing the football "through" the house until she told them not to. The boys kept looking for loopholes through their orders until it ended with Malcolm and Reese in their respective bedrooms, sitting at their windows, and still throwing the football at each other. Malcolm told Reese it wasn't fun anymore and Reese replied that no longer was the idea.
  • In another story, Malcolm was in charge of the school paper and was forbidden from posting a certain article. In retaliation, he started his own independent paper and distributed it as close to school as possible without being within its jurisdiction so they'd have no say to whatever he publishes in his paper.
• In the final season of Benson, Gov. Gatling used a loop hole in the state constitution's term limit language to run for a third term, since it stated that only affiliated party members were barred. It didn't say anything about someone running as an independent.
• In The Great Food Truck Race 2, the teams were told to take some meat from a certain storage and make an original sausage to be judged. Whoever won would be given something to help out in their actual challenge. Korilla BBQ figured they had no chance against the other teams and considering they only had a hundred dollars to start their challenge, they opted to simply take ingredients from the storage to be used in the actual challenge and didn't bother making a sausage. The judge admitted that this was smart.
  • Korilla BBQ seems to be fond of this. When the contestants were given 5 dollars each and told that they could spend no more to make a single dish to be judged, Korilla BBQ raided the condiment stand.
• This appears to be Kirk's policy with the Prime Directive in Star Trek the Original Series: the Prime Directive mentions healthy and/or natural development, depending on the quote in question... which of course means a captain is free to argue about what constitutes natural and healthy development for a culture.
• On Boy Meets World, Cory and Shawn somehow move Rachel's car into her dorm room as part of an Escalating War and Rachel tries to get them in trouble with Mr. Feeny but he refuses to punish them because there aren't any rules against parking a car in a dorm room.
• Used by Klinger in Series/Mash when Col. Potter took command. The Colonel ordered Klinger to wear nothing but U.S. military uniforms. After enduring some issues with his regular issue uniform, he wears a female sailor's uniform from his Shirley Temple Collection.
• In earlier seasons of The Amazing Race, it was common to see teams like Rob & Amber (Seasons 7 & 11) and Charla & Mirna (Seasons 5 & 11) convince locals to go along with them on legs, helping them navigate past the other teams. Luckily, this loophole was closed after All-Stars.
• On the game show Lingo, the object is to guess a five-letter word and spell it. Host Chuck Woolery often mentioned "it's not what you say, it's what you spell". This has led to people occasionally abusing this rule upon realizing they've accidentally guessed a six-letter word ("Breath. B-R-E-A...D", which is ruled as a guess for "Bread"). One team said one word and spelled another on the fly four times in the course of two rounds, to their advantage and Chuck's amusement.
• In season 8 of French version of Peking Express, the teams must gather 5 people named Kim before being allowed to leave Jeonju. Ain't no rule stating two teams can't go to the checkpoint with the same people. Cécilia & Joel's and Gérard & Cédric's teams having found each two people named Kim work together to find a fifth and go to the checkpoint one after the other with those 5.
• On How I Met Your Mother Barney is at a casino and tries to ride off on a motorcycle that was the jackpot prize for a slot machine he hadn't won. Casino security stops him, but they find they can't punish him because there isn't a rule saying you can't ride a motorcycle on the casino floor. Barney gets off scott-free, and from that day forward the casino has a "No motorcycles on the casino floor" sign prominently displayed.

New Media

• TASVideos often uploads runs that beat the game in a ridiculously low amount of time. The catch is that "beat the game" is defined as "trigger the The End screen", even if that's done by exploiting an obscure glitch rather than actually, you know, beating the game. A few Egregious examples literally jump into the ending sequence from the middle of the game for no apparent reason.
  • Super Mario World in two and a half minutes.
  • Earthbound in nine minutes.
  • Kirbys Adventure in five and a half minutes.
  • Also, even if the ending screen is glitched up and scrambled due to prior hi-jinks, it still counts, which happens in at least one run.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin once responded to the test question "Explain Newton's First Law of Motion in your own words" with, "Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz."
  • Another example:

Mrs. Wormwood: CALVIN, PAY ATTENTION! We're studying geography! Now, what state do you live in? Calvin: Denial. Mrs. Wormwood: *sigh* I don't suppose I can argue with that...

• Employed by Peter in FoxTrot, where he writes a book report three pages long in a massive font. Apparently, the teacher didn't say anything about font size.
• The Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert once instituted a company policy where each bug fixed would earn the fixer a $10 bonus. However, there was no rule against adding new bugs for the sole purpose of fixing them.
• In one strip of Garfield when the eponymous cat was on a diet, he invoked this trope when he realized a cake was carrot.
  • Not to mention the time Jon tried to teach Garfield self-control. He left a box of kitty treats in the room Garfield was in, telling him not to touch it. He left the room, then reentered a short while later. Garfield took everything except the box.
  • Even more audacious when Garfield was on another diet and Jon told him "You may have a salad." Garfield promptly helped himself to some pork chops, and when Jon called him out he claimed that no one had ever told him that pork chops were not a salad!
  • And once again: "This salad needs something. I think I'll garnish it. With a ham!" *wham*
• In Peanuts, Lucy often uses this trope to trick Charlie Brown into kicking the football. The format is as follows:

Lucy: I'll hold the ball and you come running and kick it. Charlie Brown: I'm not falling for that again! Lucy: <insert apparently airtight promise here> (e.g. "Here's a signed document, testifying that I promise not to pull it away.") Charlie Brown: Okay, I guess you mean it this time. (e.g. "It is signed! It's a signed document. I guess if you have a signed document in your possession, you can't go wrong. This year I'm really gonna kick that football.") [Lucy pulls the football away yet again] Lucy: <insert explanation of the loophole she left herself> (e.g. "Peculiar thing about this document -- it wasn't ever notarized.")

Puzzles

• A puzzle requires drawing a full box with an X in the middle without taking your pencil off the paper. Normally, this would be impossible...but there Ain't No Rule that says you can't fold the paper over before you start to draw; with this trick, you just draw a square "C" over where the paper overlaps, unfold the paper so the "c" "breaks" into two horizontal lines, then draw an hourglass in the empty space, all without lifting up the pencil. A Variant: draw a circle with a dot in the middle without taking your pencil off the paper.
  • Since the exact dimensions the x in the middle of the box must be aren't specified, you can also get away with this one: Draw one side of a square and then draw a diagonal line, which will connect to the other end of the opposite side of the square, which you then draw. Repeat this on the other side to finish the x, and then complete the box by drawing the final two sides of the square, tracing over previously drawn lines to avoid having to lift your pencil.
  • In that case, you take a pencil, place it on a piece of paper, then casually whip out a pen with which you then draw the dotted circle... Without the pencil leaving the paper.
  • Alternately, use a mechanical pencil, draw a circle, press on the button to retract the lead, move to the center of the circle, press the button again to extend the lead, and complete the dot.
    • Do note that that puzzle also makes no mention regarding overlapping lines, meaning you can draw the box, draw a diagonal from the last corner, retrace a side, then do the other diagonal.
      • Yes it does, but I am not sure that it makes mention of using two pencils...
        • Does it specify not using extra lines? If not than you can just draw all you need to in order to solve both of these.
• It's not uncommon to encounter a number puzzle that has no solution unless you exploit the rules in this fashion. For example, there's a famous Henry Dudeney puzzle where you have to circle six of the following numbers to make a total of 21:

9 9 9 7 7 7 5 5 5 3 3 3 1 1 1

• • It can't be done as intended, because the total will always be even. Dudeney's solution? There Ain't No Rule saying you can't turn the paper upside-down first, letting you circle three 6s and three 1s.
  • A reader came up with an alternative solution; drawing a single circle around two 1s to get 11, then circling three 3s and the other 1.
• The classic "nine dots" puzzle challenges you to connect a square of nine dotes with just four straight lines without lifting your pen from the paper. It's impossible to do this unless you literally "think outside the box" and notice that there's nothing in the puzzle that forbids letting the lines run outside of the square.
  • Or you can fold the paper, use a very thick line, connect your four straight lines with a few curvy lines, etc.
  • Nobody said what shape it had to be, you can start at one corner, go out, go diagonal, go back, and go diagonal again.
• Tie a knot in a length of rope with both hands without letting go of the rope. There Ain't No Rule saying you can't tie your arms in a knot first (ie, fold your arms).
  • Or tie the knot around your arm, or tie an unknot, or stop holding it with one hand, but keep a firm grip with the other, and thus not letting go, or tying the knot in a different part of the rope, or don't hold on with your hands in the first place (but still use your hands in some other way) or hold the rope in a circle around you while tying a knot with a piece of string while inside the circle.
• One worksheet that is sometimes given to students in (usually elementary) school describes the classic "You are in a supermarket but find that your cart can only make left turns. Navigate the supermarket, getting everything on your list making only left turns"-maze scenario. There was no rule stating people can't draw a U-turn back to the start (where they get the cart" and write "Get a new cart that isn't broken."

Tabletop Games and Board Games

• Old time wargamers of the Avalon Hill type may remember the nightmarish nonsense--like losing all of the British Empire to an attack carried out on London by a single airborne unit--that followed trying to play Rise and Decline of the Third Reich in its first edition in the mid 1970s. (The game's designer, John Prados, is brilliant at concept but, even in the seventh edition published in 2000, proved that he STILL can't write rules for doodly.....)
• Apparently, the official rules of Chess once had a loophole that rendered the game 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nc6 3.Qxf7 mate a victory for White. Although the White Queen cannot move this way legally, checkmate ended the game. The other side could only claim an illegal move while the game was in play. After a checkmate, legal move or not, it was too late. This is just the most famous example of how this major flaw in the rules could be exploited.
  • The current FIDE Laws now state that checkmate ends the game, provided the move that brought it about was legal. Which ends that one.
  • For a while, there was no rule that you couldn't promote a pawn into an enemy piece to block the other player's path.
    • There is a similar case of promoting a pawn into a king.
    • Castling can be performed with a king and a rook which have never moved from the position they were placed. Which led to someone promoting their king's pawn into a rook and using it to castle vertically, until the rules were rewritten to prevent this.
• Scrabble. It is, technically, perfectly legal to play words that don't exist - you just have to pay the penalty if you're challenged. If you can bluff your opponents into thinking it's a real word and not challenging, you're good to go.
  • An episode of CSI featured a Lawyer Friendly Cameo Scrabble player who used this as his play style. He would play a fake word (in this example: "exvin") and bluff his opponent (the justifying definition: "a wine aficionado that no longer drinks"). When the opponent extended the word ("exvins"), the first player would call a challenge, at which point the opponent had to pick up all the offending letter tiles in addition to the one he played and take a penalty. The player ended up literally choking on his words.
• There's a reason the comprehensive rules and errata for Magic the Gathering is hundreds of pages long and reads like a federal tax code. The rule-makers are constantly having to close odd loopholes the players figure out with each new batch of cards and the thousands of possible interactions that open up.
  • One of the most (in)famous examples of Magic rule bending is such: There was a card called the Chaos Orb which had the ability to take out of play any card(s) it landed on after you flipped it in the air. One clever player TORE UP his Chaos Orb and sprinkled the pieces all over his opponent's playing area, thus effectively removing most of those cards from the game. The Tournament judge ruled the maneuver legal, as nowhere did it say the card had to be in one piece.
    • The other loophole was for the opposing player to catch the card in the air then either hold on to it (thus it never landed), or drop it on any card they choose. Errata for the eventually specified that you couldn't interfere.
  • If there was such a ruling (they weren't systematically recorded in those days), it was overturned in 1994 with a Word of God ruling that tearing up the card made it "marked", and you would lose the match for playing with a marked card. You would then be required to replace it with another Chaos Orb before the next round started or you would lose that match for illegally changing your deck configuration. Loophole Abuse cuts both ways.
  • This was subsequently parodied in Magic: Unglued with the card "Chaos Confetti".
  • When used as intended Chaos Orb spawned another loophole: players would spread their cards out over a ludicrously large area so Chaos Orb couldn't touch more than one when it landed, or would lean their cards against things so that it was impossible to land on top of them at all. A ruling has since been made that you can't rearrange your cards after Chaos Orb enters the game; also you must not have your cards stacked or in places where your opponent can't read their name or count them.
  • There are a lot of looping combinations.
  • Then of course there was the infamous pre-alpha version of Time Walk, with the text, "Opponent loses next turn". When it was realised that anyone playing it would cause his opponent to lose the game at the start of his next turn, it was changed to "Take an extra turn after this one".
  • An urban legend claims that in one tournament, a player cast a spell with the effect "Target players loses the game," then pointed at a completely different table and said "That guy.". Of course, you can't do that, even if nothing in the rules state the target must be in the game you're playing. That's not something necessary to state explicitly. You can't cast a Lightning Bolt at a player in another game either, or cast Control Magic on one of his creatures, or Counterspell one of his spells.
• Munchkins in Dungeons and Dragons are worse than Rules Lawyers: some players go for full-blown Loophole Abuse.
  • Players can turn Locate City into a nuclear bomb.
  • Others recovered from infinite damage by drowning themselves. Taken literally, the drowning rules set your hit points to zero, even if they're negative.
    • And then It's Wet Outside lets someone make a heal check to stop drowning.
  • Passing an item hand to hand is a free action (doesn't take up time), so if you line up a few thousand people you can get an object to travel miles in six seconds. Then the last person throws it.
    • You can also have one player stand on another player's shoulders and pick him up as a free action. Then the other player picks him up. Since this is all a free action, there is no time for them to fall, and thus they can fly by repeatedly picking eachother up in midair.
  • Dropping an item is a free action, as well. And if you happen to be fireproof and are standing next to an enemy while carrying, say, 500 Alchemist's Fires... Though the logistics of actually carrying 500 Alchemist's Fires is a bit screwy in and of itself (seriously, you normally only have two hands to drop them from).
  • Dungeons and Dragons never has loopholes. Rule 0 (the DM can change whatever rules necessary) ensures this. Of course, it's completely possible just to get something to work merely by having the moxie to think it up and try it.
    • And in almost all cases results in even more loopholes when amateurs with poor understanding of the rules to begin with try to tamper with them.
  • Perhaps the most true-to-form example of this trope (at least by the alternate name, Ain't No Rule) is that while the state of Dying is explicitly defined in the rules as far as what actions are acceptable, the state of Dead has no restrictions. There literally Ain't No Rule preventing a freshly-killed player from standing up and continuing the fight.
  • There's no official restriction preventing you from using the spell True Creation to make planet-destroying quantities of antimatter.
    • Besides the obvious (just saying "No,"), a GM could ask "So how many ranks do you have in 'Knowledge: Advanced Physics Not Known In This Universe' and 'Craft: Materials I've Never Heard Of?' anyway? Oh, that's right, zero. The spell fails as your caster can't decide to create something he doesn't know exists. Since the XP cost is paid even if the spell fails, I now need to establish a GP value for priceless antimatter. Huh, seems you didn't have enough XP to cast the spell anyway, so it would fail on that grounds too. You're lucky I'm a stickler for the rules, as they state you can't lose a level for this." Loophole Abuse is equally funny when pushed back in the face of a smarmy Rules Lawyer.
  • The various settings tend to have in-universe cases somewhere in all the history and organizations. For instance, House Jorasco healers are not supposed to treat without payment in money... but there is nothing hindering them from lending the necessary money and then setting a task as repayment in kind for the loan.
  • In universe, the infamous Wish spell. This spell can be cast by high level wizards, or can be granted by a few select creatures (like Djinns), but they should always be met with caution. Too careless wishing can result in getting the exact opposite of what was intended, depending on the maliciousness of the creature and / or the DM. For example, when wishing for a mighty artifact, the caster might grant you the artifact... by teleporting you into the tomb where the artifact is located, in the middle of it's undead guardians.
• In the Munchkin card game, some people think you can freely equip and use items you are not legally able to, as long as you don't get caught. As in any game, this is cheating if made on purpose.

"That's not the purpose of [Go Up A Level cards], but it's so vile and Munchkinly that we love it too much to say no." Steve Jackson Games, on whether Go Up A Level cards could be used on enemies to provoke monsters that ignore characters below a certain level.

• • People holding as many cards as possible in your hand and doing whatever they can to prevent others from noticing that they're holding more than five are cheating. Contrary to what some urban legend claims, it's not legal to cheat in Munchkin.
  • Early versions of the Loaded Dice card did not specify that the value you choose to replace that of a die roll had to be between one and six. And there are plenty of cards to abuse this with, like one monster that gets a bonus to its level equal to the roll of one die.
• The Lore of Blood Bowl is rife with coaches doing whatever it takes to win. For example, players are strictly forbidden from carrying weapons on the pitch. Where most players figured it didn't count as a weapon if the blades were fixed to the armour, the Dwarves argued it meant riding a bulldozer on the field was allowed - it's not carried, is it? The actual gameplay reflects that spirit. In first and second edition of the game, the rulebooks for the various ways a player could cheat were almost as long as the actual game's rules (and even more byzantine).
• The entire concept of Pledges from Changeling: The Lost practically begs the player to use this trope; as is frequently the case with The Fair Folk, neither the True Fae nor Changeling Pledges recognize any such thing as "the spirit of the agreement." You just have to make very, very sure that you actually know what you're doing.
• An in-universe example from Warhammer 40000. The Ecclesasty cannot have "Men-At-Arms", due to some high mucky-muck trying to take over The Empire. Cue Amazon Brigade. (Whether this was loophole abuse or the reason for the phrasing varies by source).
  • The FAQ articles have had to correct some in the past. The Swooping Hawks' Intercept rule reads "the unit never requires worse than a 4+ to hit an enemy vehicle", which means that the WS 4 Swooping Hawks could hit a WS 5 Venerable Dreadnaught on a 4+ instead of a 5+ as the normal compare-WS table would indicate, for instance. An Ork list that was designed entirely around exploiting the wound allocation rules in fifth edition by giving every model in every unit different gear was briefly popular on the tournament scene.
• This trope is Mr. Welch's bread and butter, even if the GM doesn't tend to be cooperative. The phrase "even if the rules allow it" and variants thereof appear no less than 47 times throughout the ever-growing list.
• There are a lot of infamous combos and infinite loops in Yu-Gi-Oh that result from this. The vast majority of them involves exploitation of the ruling that, except in very rare cases, a monster's effect is "reset" when it is flipped face-down or removed from the field temporarily, allowing you to reuse the same effect multiple times in one turn, with the right setup.
  • Before it was banned, the card Last Turn was the subject of quite a few loopholes, mainly due to the fact that it didn't negate monster effects while it was in use. To wit, when it's activated, both players choose a monster to be on the field (the activator from their field, the opponent from their deck) and battle; whoever has a monster remaining on the field after the battle wins, otherwise it's a tie. Thing is, the monster left on the field doesn't have to be the one the player chose for the battle, and the card doesn't negate monster effects, so if you have a monster on the field that can prevent Special Summons (thus, preventing the opponent from getting out their chosen monster), or one that can summon out a monster when destroyed (thus leaving you with a monster after the battle), you can easily screw over the opponent with it.
• in the Axis & Allies miniatures game, air units were a late addition, meaning a lot of previous cards weren't prepared for their entry. Thus, units that should not be able to attack planes, like mortars and certain assault guns, can. Worst of all, land mines can affect planes. Those are some epically bouncing betties.
  • Errata dictates that units with the "bombardment" ability can no longer attack planes, eliminating most ground artillery from the equation-- but mines and mortars are still okay.
• In Mutant UA a robot-class player or NPC could have drones as an "option". Maximum would be 4 without any penalties for too many options, but drones could have their own options, deliberately so for the sake of being useful, but nothing states they couldn't have drones as well. Cue infinite horde of massively powerful drones! (although rule 0 almost always stops this as it's crazy-powerful.
• In the CCG "EVE: The Second Genesis" one of the main ways to gain money (used to play further cards) are location cards. One such location has the effect "When this card comes into play, sacrifice a location". The officially sanctioned loophole around this is to play the card into an uncontrolled region. Because the region is uncontrolled, the location is uncontrolled too and the effect does not activate...

Theatre

• Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark: is currently exploiting a longstanding critic tradition of not releasing a review until after opening night by labeling all of their productions as "dress rehearsals" - at full price. In fact, rumor has it that the producers intend to keep it in dress rehearsals it's entire run and never formally open it.
  • Then again, there's no rule that says critics have to wait for opening night to review a show either--a fact many reviewers took advantage of when the official opening had been delayed one too many times. To say they were unkind would be a massive understatement.

Video Games

• Leet Speek, or "1337 sp33k" was this to bypass server filters on curse words.
• Aint No Rule against "Ghosting" or "Stream-sniping".
  • To elaborate, professional people often stream their games. Their opponents are well aware of this, and will join in their stream as an anonymous watcher or as a dummy-account and spy on their opponents when the game doesn't let them do it. Against the rules? Nope - Aint No Rule saying you can't do it, since it's not part of the game itself.
• The party in Tales of Hearts scales the tall Tower of Heroes King's Cross as part of the Inevitable Tournament, only to be greeted by the recurring tourney champ Ameth, who informs them that there Ain't No Rule about riding an airship to the top of the tower.
• Referenced in ~Baldur's Gate~ II with a magic ring that fires a blast of fire. The text indicates it was used in a duel between two drow, where each was allowed the use of one magical item. It was used by a friend of one of them, who shot their opponent in the back from the stands. Being drow, everyone agreed it was a brilliant interpretation of the rules.
• The World Ends With You has the entry fee, in which the Conductor takes from the player whatever is most valuable to him or her. The loophole is that the Conductor gets to choose what that entry fee is. In Week 2, he takes Shiki Misaki as the fee to hide the fact that he can't return her to life. In week 3 Kitaniji takes every other player from the game as Neku's entry fee because a player is helpless without a partner. This creates a situation so Unwinnable that even Uzuki and Kariya are doubtful of its morality. Thankfully there was Beat, a Reaper who was willing to Heel Face Turn.
• Sim City 4 Deluxe can ultimately allow a player (through some basic building making and basic modding of course) to have apartments on light density zones and who knows what else. Sure, it says no apartments develop on light density, but who said anything about pencil towers or duplexes for that matter if you truly cared? In fact, half of modding the game is about ballooning zone densities to unbelievable sizes with building types.
• In the Half Life expansion Opposing Forces protagonist Adrian Shephard can avoid the order to kill Black Mesa personnel to cover up the incident because he never officially got that part of his orders. He should be able to reasonably deduce that part of his orders by asking (or just watching) the others, but remains purposefully ignorant.
• Explicitly invoked by Aegis in Persona 3: "Nowhere in the school regulations does it state that canines are prohibited from attending school." It doesn't happen.
• My World, My Way is built around "Ain't no rule" as a gameplay aspect. Why struggle when whining can change your situation?
• Sissel turns this in Ghost Trick. He can only go back to four minutes before someone dies. But Yomiel's body technically died ten years ago and stayed suspended at the moment of death until the meteorite was removed to make him truly dead. Sissel uses Yomiel's body to go back ten years into the past and avert the events that made Yomiel into a ghost in the first place, thus changing the entire timeline to save everyone.
• Given that it was a widely-played MMORPG, World of Warcraft has had a few instances, some controversial, some not:
  • Given that this achievement is typically extremely difficult (or, depending on your class, nearly impossible), it's generally considered that the intended way of achieving it is through abusing the rather literal wording of the achievement
  • Another Loophole Abuse in the game was involving Warlocks. Demonology warlocks used to have a talent point where their active pet would give them a buff, and if they sacrificed it, they would be given a different buff to replace the one granted by the pet. However, one curious player who had invested in engineering attempted to use the goblin jumper cables on his pet, and to his surprise, the pet then came back to life and granted them the buff...while they still had the buff from sacrificing the demon on top of it. Other warlocks begun to try this too, although it was still a pretty low chance of success, it worked. It wasn't even removed in an Obvious Rule Patch, believe it or not - Blizzard even encouraged people to try it. It was removed before expansions, though.
  • Before it was removed, someone described a pretty creative use of Hello Insert Name Here as a hunter. Aint No Rule saying you can't give your pet the same name as you to screw up targeting macros.
    • Aint No Rule against making a couple toons for Pv P and then giving them really long names that're hard to type (and start with the same letter) or really similar names for the same purpose.
  • Griefing has had many loopholes....
    • "Rooftop camping". Before there was no rule against people with ranged attacks (especially hunters) standing on the roof of a building in contested territory and firing. Normally, guards should have been able to come in and hurt them, but since the guards could not get up to the roof, couldn't do anything to stop players from picking off others on the ground. Duskwood was the best place to do this because there was a ledge where you could jump onto a roof and the guards woudln't spawn. However, they would normally die from you and not suffer durability loss - in Gadgetzan, it was far more annoying, because people would just shoot one person and then feign death as the guards run over and pummel the poor player to death. Snipers were added on the roofs to prevent this.
    • In neutral Goblin cities (Booty Bay, Ratchet, Gadgetzan, Everlook), Rogues would often grief players by sneaking up to them, sticking a knife in their side, and then vanishing while the guards beat up the player who was busy wondering what the hell was going on.
  • Aint No Rule against kiting ridiculously strong monsters into capital cities.
  • A few rather hilarious examples resulted in an Obvious Rule Patch:
    • Before it was given to Mages as a talent, a boss in Molten Core named Baron Geddon would make a certain raid member a "living bomb" which would cause them to eventually explode and damage all people nearby. He could also do this to pets, too - and people realized that you could get past this by simply dismissing the pet. However, one time a hunter did this and then called it out in the middle of a heavily populated city...and he still ahd the living bomb debuff. A few seconds later, there was a mountain of corpses in the middle of the auction House. Cue people replicating this until it was fixed in a patch.
    • The famous Corrupted Blood Incident resulted from a hunter taking an infected pet into Ironforge&Orgrimmar and spreading the plague across the cities.
    • Aint No Rule against putting a single item for sale at a huge price so people buying stuff for crafting professions accidentally buy one item instead of a full stack.
    • In one instance, a programming oversight resulted in a Worgen mob being able to be tamed. So a bunch of hunters eventually caught and tamed this pet. Unfortunate Implications resulted as Worgen became playable characters around this time..
  • Aint No Rule against bringing friend(s) into the Raid Finder and have them roll on gear they don't need to increase the chances that you'll win it.
  • A rare positive example that could honestly have been done in any game (and has been rumoured to have been done in Majora's Mask before), a player in a guild had a buddy who was rendered blind by an accident while stationed in Iraq. He regularly performs very well in-game, so how does he do it? The blind player and his friend acting as a "Seeing eye dog" used mods, macros, and private-sound channels so that he could literally play the game blind.
• Humans in Mass Effect under the Treaty of Farixen are only allowed to build one dreadnought per every five the Turians have. Instead they began building carriers which were not subject to any restrictions. Of course, this was mostly due to the fact that Humans were the ones to introduce the concept of Carriers to the Galaxy in the first place.
  • In Mass Effect 3, there are several ways the quarians try to get around this rule: they were arming every single ship they had so even the huge ships would be armed (and as such weren't purpose-built dreadnoughts), they were salvaging destroyed dreadnoughts thus making what the quarians were doing technically rebuilding them, the Council is too busy prosecuting the war with the Reapers to pay attention to them, and even if the council wasn't, the quarians never signed the treaty in the first place and they largely operate outside the Council's jurisdiction anyway.
• Saturos in Golden Sun lives and breathes this trope, routinely making the heroes offers that he words so they don't get anything out of them. The most memorable deal is offering a girl's safety in exchange for a MacGuffin... a girl that he needed safe anyway, and he never said anything about letting her go. It's part of his charm.
• Metal Gear Solid has an interesting one. There are laws limiting the use of nuclear missiles. Metal Gear Rex uses a rail-gun to fire nuclear warheads.
• In Disgaea 2 you will repeatedly be subpoenaed by the Dark Court for various "crimes" committed by your party members. This being the Netherworld, you want to have extensive crime records, since it gives benefits. While the rules stipulate that a person has to find and enter the gate to the Dark Court, it doesn't actually have to be the person who did the crime. It also doesn't say only one person has to go in - you can form a ladder and throw up to nine people before the judge, who will write up everyone for this underhanded behavior.
• Played with in Inazuma Eleven 3, when Coach Kudou forbids the entire team from going outside to practice or play soccer. To Endou, no soccer is probably as bad as having no food to eat, so he grows restless and starts kicking a soccer ball around indoors. Several of his teammates notice and realize that Kudou only forbade practicing outside, so they start doing Improvised Training indoors, as silly as that may sound. But then it turns out this was exactly what Coach Kudou wanted them to do, as being able to control and keep possession of the ball within tight boundaries would turn out to be extremely useful against their next opponents' tactics.
• In Runescape, the "Falador Massacre" was a result of a player abusing a glitch. The first player to reach level 99 of Construction held a party in his house. Eventually, so many players flooded the house that it crashed and booted them all to Falador. However, players inside the arena in the player's house were still flagged for Pv P (which the other players weren't, and was disabled in that zone at the time) and proceeded to go on a killing spree.
• The Cavern of Transcendence trial in City of Heroes required a team to get through the enemy-filled caves beneath the Hollows and then enter the Cavern, a massive room filled with monsters, and then activate 8 triggers (one for each team member) simultaneously that were spread throughout the room, in 90 minutes after receiving the mission. The obvious intended challenge was obviously for the team to fight through the caves, then clear out the monsters before activating the triggers. However, activating the triggers is all that's required to actually successfully complete the trial. A standard tactic quickly became having one team member with superspeed (which has a stealth benefit) and/or flight plus invisibility or some kind of stealth power, and recall (teleporting one teammate to your position) race through the caves, past all the enemy mobs, to the Cavern door and teleport in teammates. Upon entering the Cavern, the stealth teleporter would go to each trigger in turn and bring in a teammate, again without alerting any of the monsters. End result? A 90 minute trial that could be finished in a few minutes without having to engage a single enemy.
• A shortcoming in the engine that supported Defense of the Ancients allowed players to kill their own mobs. So what this encouraged was someone to stay behind and kill every single one of "Their" mobs so the enemies couldn't get experience at all, and thus the "Deny" mechanic was born.
  • The sequel by Valve added a pause feature so people don't have to have a Bladder of Steel (or in case something happens that makes their game client crash.) don't cost their team the game. In order to prevent people from using this as an excuse to pause the game and plan ganks or other elaborate plans, any person can force-unpause the game. However, this appears to have encouraged the perverse Double Standard that whenever the afk player is on their team, the other team will wait for them...and whenever they're on your team, you can practically hear the other team saying, "Aint No Rule saying we can't constantly force-unpause the game and get further ahead while they're gone,"
• In-game example in The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: If you use Thu'um shouts within the view of a hold's guards, they'll get on your case and tell you to stop that "... shouting thing". If you take the "Make me" route in the dialog, they say there isn't any rule really, and then cut off with "I'm watching you..."
• League of Legends often gives deals to get champion skins for free. However, if you do not have the champion in question, you can still get the champion and the skin for free.
• Related, PC gamer magazine often runs a code to receive a freebie for a game in its magazine, such as a free pet in Guild Wars or a free champion (and a skin) in League of Legends. There's always at least one person who goes onto their forums and asks them for a new code because theirs didn't work - Aint No Rule saying people can't just go into a magazine store, take a copy of the magazine, snap a picture with their phone or write it down, and then enter it into the game without having to pay a cent for the magazine.
• Fate Stay Night is filled with these.
  • The Holy Grail War is a fight between Servants. Aint No Rule that you can't kill a Master (who is usually a Squishy Wizard) to make their Servant disappear.
  • A Master is given the power to summon one Servant, and if he loses it he can form a contract with a Servant whose Master was killed. Aint No Rule that he can't form contracts with multiple Servants at once.
  • Aint No Rule that a Servant can't summon another Servant. Or that Assassin has to be an actual assassin, apparently.
  • Aint No Rule that the supervisor of the war can't compete in the war.
  • The Berserker class has probably never been used for its original purpose (powering up a weak Servant to usable levels), with every known Master opting to make a powerful Servant even more powerful.
  • Aint No Rule that you have to wait until the war begins to summon your Servant.
  • Broken Phantasm is a technique that releases all the power in a Servant's legendary weapon at once, destroying it in the process. Aint No Rule that you can't use it with temporary copies of weapons.
  • From the 3rd Holy Grail war in the backstory and Fate Hollow Ataraxia: Aint No Rule that you can't apply your family's "cast spells twice" ability to the ritual that summons Saber. Meanwhile, the summoning of Angra Mainyu as Avenger was an attempt at Aint No Rule that suffered from Epic Fail and Gone Horribly Right (They tried to summon the god of evil and got a random guy whom early humans used as a scapegoat, who has no powers and only qualifies as a Servant by being the embodiment of humanity's wish for Pure Evil to exist in a form they can see. When he dies his spirit enters the Grail... which grants wishes.).
• Similar to Germany before World War Two (see Real Life example below), USSR in Red Alert 2 manages to build up a large military partly through this trope. One of the restrictions is the limitation on military aircraft. So, the Soviets build thousands of armored zeppeling to act as bombers. Aint No Rule about mind-controlling giant squids to sink Allied ships, right? Of course, having powerful psychics under your command means you can have every Allied inspector come back saying exactly what you want him to say, even if he just saw a column of Apocalypse tanks roll by.
• Tin Star has an example, with the sheriff Tin Star trying to figure out how to deal with an invasion of bandits dressed up as women without breaking the code "never shoot women and children".

Mo: Now what do we do, Tin Star? Why are you looking at that Good Guy Code of the West? Tin Star: Looking for loopholes. Aha! Mo: What? Tin Star: It says here "never shoot women and children." Mo: Yeah, so? Tin Star: So these are just women on their own! Get my guns, Mo!

• Used to thwart the fal'Cie's plan in Final Fantasy XIII. The l'Cie's focus was to destroy Cocoon by killing Orphan, the fal'Cie responsible for providing the rest of the Cocoon fal'Cie with the power needed for maintaining Cocoon's vital functions. The Focus didn't say anything about what they could do after they accomplished this task, which is the loophole Fang and Vanille abuse to save Cocoon from crashing into Gran Pulse and killing its entire populace as the fal'Cie wanted.
• The Professor Layton series absolutely adores this trope. With each game's puzzle collection, you can expect at least 20% of it to be comprised of puzzles that can only be solved by exploiting loopholes in the rules.

Web Comics

• In the webcomic Terror Island, one arc involving a competition to skateboard over a river ends with the alien baddie teleporting over the river instead; he wins, because "teleporting" is one of the few things not prohibited by the contest's rules, as the people drawing it up couldn't conceive of it.
• A hilarious variation occurs in Schlock Mercenary, where the crew of the mercenary ship effectively avoid any litigation by becoming legally appointed bounty hunters, hunting members of the lawyer collective. They could still be sued if anyone apart from them used non-Collective attorneys, but Massey is the only non-Collective lawyer we've seen, and he's a member of the company.
• Therkla invokes this trope to her advantage in this page of Order of the Stick.
• Webcomics trope-poking: Red Mage of ~8-Bit Theater~ would like to direct your attention to the Air Bud clause (Ain't no rule that says you can't use dice in rock-paper-scissors). This is also Black Mage's solution to an obstacle course: Ain't no rule that you can't just blow it up!
  • Also here:

Black Mage: We're going to grab the non-fabric of this anti-space time and rip it a new one. Red Mage: Is that even possible? I'm not sure this place actually exists. Black Mage: Then there's no rule that says we can't.

• In the webcomic Brat Halla, there ain't no rule saying that a god dueling another as a tie-breaker in the Pantheon Games can't call in his independently sentient, disembodied eyeball in a Humongous Mecha to help him. For extra amusement, after t'other god tries to cite its absence in the rules, that there ain't no rule saying you can, the eyeball in its mech comes in and cites the rule in question. Linksky.
• According to The Whiteboard, there is no rule forbidding the use of cross-country skis in paintball games. Doc checked very carefully.
• Emily wins her first race in Misfile. Ain't no rule against driving 25 mph once you're ahead of your opponent!
• Aki Alliance: There's a rule against wearing a headset to receive outside help during a Scrabble competition. Oddly enough, there's no rule against wearing a headset to give outside help to someone else during a Scrabble competition.
• Subverted in this strip of Chasing the Sunset where there is a specific rule about knocking out a minotaur and stealing its keys to defeat a magic trial. Because it has already been abused.
• In Collar 6 Sixx plans to win her bet with Butterfly by surrendering her title to Laura and becoming her slave so that she can take part in the contest directly.
• Kevin and Kell: The Domain version of the Face Book game Farmville apparently doesn't disallow players from raiding their own henhouse.
• Gaia Online's four towns engaged in loophole abuse during the "Reject Olympics" plot, by recruiting nonhuman athletes for their teams.
  • Johnny K. Gambino was apparently forbidden from creating new zombie serums. So for the Reject Olympics he pulled an old failed prototype from storage instead, and bummed a corpse from the Devil Imps...
• In this Cyanide and Happiness strip, a character manages to get around the classic three wishes limit clause ("A wish cannot be used to grant more wishes") by wishing for more genies.
• The Constitution didn't provide for insane bunny senators and therefore did not lay down a rule about what to do when one goes missing. In Prickly City, this matters.
• Protoman in Bob and George does this with his Three Laws Compliance.

George: You're a robot! You're not allowed to kill humans! Protoman: That only applies if I think he's a human, which I don't.

• Tristan pulls this in Angel Moxie so she can get away with a Nonuniform Uniform in the form of striped stockings. She even recites the specific rule, noting that while there are limits on what kind of socks can be worn, stockings are allowed as an alternative and there are no such limitations for them.
• Take one tabletop-gaming Rules Lawyer from our universe and drop him into an RPG Mechanics Verse with the instructions to "grant our side victory by any means possible". You now have the plot of Erfworld.
• Schlock Mercenary: Presumably, after this strip there's now a company policy regarding air vents, where there wasn't one previously.
• Xkcd: "There's no rule on the books saying a meerkat can't play rugby." Though, according to the Alt Text, there are rules against gorillas and golden retrievers.
• Fruit Incest double-subverts this one in "Rule". There's no rule against a duck playing on the school soccer team, but there is a rule that every player on the team must be enrolled as a student. But there's no rule against a duck being enrolled as a student, either.
• In Rhapsodies the local office of the Department of Minor Nuisances is unable to covertly support the Circle Band due to rules and budget concerns. Nothing wrong with doing it overtly though.
• Freefall: A vital survival skill for robots and other engineered intelligences, such as the uplifted wolf Florence Ambrose.

Web Original

• Elaine E. Nalley in the Whateley Universe is so notorious for doing this at Whateley Academy that the headmistress gave her the codename Loophole. As a Rules Lawyer, this can cause problems. Eventually, she discovers that the administration believes in Rule Zero.
  • In another Whateley example, Jobe Wilkin's mandatory school codename is... Jobe Wilkins. It's not just megalomania, given his notoriety as the only son of the setting's Captain Ersatz of Dr. Doom he figures he's not going to go unrecognized in any event.
• Ain't no rule that vampires can't be gymnasts!
• Skeletor competes in a Pokémon match
• In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, the 1964 Summer Olympics saw both the United States and the Soviet Union field teams filled to the brim with super-humans. In some cases, the "athletes" were quite obviously superhuman. Olympic officials swiftly closed the loophole that allowed superhuman "athletes" and disqualified both teams before competition actually began.
• A big problem in the Template:Salvation War is that nobody has made laws pertaining to the dead, which causes quite a few legal headaches.
  • Another time, a British colonel tried to take over the command of Free Hell, only to be stopped by Julius Ceaser who points out that because of the amount of people under his command, he is technically a general.
• Skippys List has examples:

124. Two drink limit does not mean first and last. 125. Two drink limit does not mean two kinds of drinks. 126. Two drink limit does not mean the drinks can be as large as I like. 127. "No Drinking Of Alcoholic Beverages" does not imply that a Jack Daniel's® IV is acceptable. 135. An order to put polish on my boots means the whole boot.

Western Animation

• In the Woody Woodpecker short Ski For Two, Woody attempts to enter a lodge owned by Wally Walrus, only to be rejected due to the lodge only allowing those with reservations to stay there. So Woody promptly gives him lots of reservations...or rather, reservations Woody has made to other resorts and lodges.
• The Simpsons
  • Inverted and subverted in an episode where Homer enters a Robot Wars style contest as a robot. He is about to be awarded a trophy by one of the two judges. There a protest that he can't do that.

Announcer 1: Tell me where in the rule book it says that a human can't participate in a robot fighting competition! Announcer 2: Right here, rule number 1.

• • A similar scenario occurs when Homer trains a horse to be a football player. He then reads the rulebook which says they can't play in the NFL.
  • And parodied by a mock movie trailer for "Soccer Mummy". Ain't no rule that says a centuries old Egyptian mummy can't play soccer!
  • When a secret society Homer is made leader of wants to reform without him in they become the society of "No Homers". When he complains that they already let another guy named Homer in, they respond, "It says 'No Homers.' We're allowed to have one."
  • But perhaps the funniest example occurred in an early "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween episode, where Lisa dreams that she and her family purchase a magical Moroccan "monkey's paw" that grants four wishes but also finds some way to totally screw the wisher over while adhering to the wording of the wish. After the second and third wishes result in unmitigated disasters, Homer declares that he has thought of a completely foolproof wish: "I want a turkey sandwich....on rye bread....with mustard - and - and - I don't want any zombie-turkeys, and I don't want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don't want any other weird surprises. Got it?!" Homer's sandwich then appears as requested, and he promptly bites into it....and then throws a tantrum because the turkey is a little dry. (See, he said he didn't want any WEIRD surprises.)
  • Invoked by Homer in another "Treehouse of Horror" where he sells his soul for a donut. He eventually figures that if he didn't finish the donut, he wouldn't have to go to Hell. It works...until Homer sleepwalks to the kitchen later that night and eats it.
    • In the same episode, Homer is on trial for his soul. He's saved when Marge shows a picture of them on the back of which Homer wrote that his soul belongs to Marge. Apparently, this is legally-binding and, thus, supercedes the agreement between Homer and Ned the Devil.
  • In a flashback episode showing Marge pregnant with Maggie, Marge was afraid of Homer's reaction to the pregnancy so she asked her sisters to promise not to tell him about it and they agreed. Since they promised not to tell Homer about the pregnancy, they told other people so THEY would tell him.
  • That's how Cletus Spuckler could get so many pretzels (for everyone of his many children) from Marge, who was giving coupons valid for a free sample. She forgot to state that she would accept only one coupon per customer. At least this helped her to know the name of every Cletus' child...
• South Park: There also ain't no rule that a peewee hockey team can't stand in for the Colorado Avalanche against the Detroit Red Wings.
  • You can't get away with saying "shit" on television once according to standards and practices. Use it 162 times and you can quite literally Get Shit Past The Radar via Refuge in Vulgarity.
  • How they got away with Muhammad in episodes 200 and 201 by using various costumed and concealing methods in script, all Played for Laughs. Of course, then they just censored his name and the entire "I learned something" speech. Cue several episodes of retribution.
• The Bots Master had a robot playing children's baseball since each team was allowed one robot. (for carrying equipment but the rule didn't specify)
• Kim Possible, there is no rule that Ron can't try out for the Cheer Squad...and there really is no such rule. This episode struck a sore spot with many fans since male cheerleaders are not just common, but actually required in many cheer-squads. Apart from providing support for physically taxing performances, many school districts in the United States have rules requiring at least one male cheerleader on the squad for legal and ethical reasons. Anti-discriminations clauses in many state statues stipulate that if a school does not make available gender-segregated options for both genders for each school activity then existing programs must be made available to both genders.
  • Even worse was that Ron wasn't coming on necessarily as a male cheerleader, but as the mascot. Their issue? They think Ron's routine looks dumb. After Ron shows it off onscreen, one wonders if any of these girls have ever actually seen a high school (or college, for that matter) sports mascot before.
• Similar to the above example, in an episode of The Proud Family, Penny wants to try out for the football team. Subverted, when she tells the coach there's no rule saying she can't play, he still refuses due to his "girl's can't play sports" viewpoint, despite the fact she is clearly better than any of the guys on the team. Double subverted when her friend's mother is a lawyer who forces the coach to let her on the team. And shockingly triple subverted when the Couch allows her on the team, but states there was no rule that made him have to let her actually participate in the game.
• King of the Hill, Ain't No Rule that says a 45-year-old high school dropout can't come back and play the last game of the season for his old team, just for the sake of tying a record.
  • You need Haz-Mat certification to drive a Haz-mat vehicle, but you don't need one to drive a tow truck carrying a Haz-mat vehicle.
  • Dale wants a guard tower built on his property, but always gets rejected by the zoning board. He abuses the loophole by building the tower below mimimum zoning standards making it a shorter and narrower than minimum height and area and not build a foundation. The inspector notices this and calls Dale a complete imbecile. The tower soon collapses.
• Animaniacs: Ain't no rule that a chicken can't have whatever job he wants. Of course, no matter how well Chicken Boo does, he'll still get run out of town once he's found out.
• In an episode of Noddy In Toytown, Noddy is attempting to tow a giant jelly with his car, only for it to become unhitched as he is going up a hill, so it rolls back down it. The jelly rolls into Toytown where Noddy is finally able to stop it. An amused Mr. Plod (the policeman) sees the jelly and consults his rule book, and while there is a section on jelly there is nothing against the law over speeding jellies.
• Gargoyles: Puck in his opening episode manages off Loophole Abuse multiple times. Demona just didn't learn. Puck: "Did you say, that human, or that human? Ah, I'll figure it out myself." And then he turns said human into a gargoyle, thus ridding Demona of that human. Later, he twisted another wish and turned all humans in Manhattan into Gargoyles. When Demona wished them to be turned humans, he took advantage of the fact she didn't specify which gargoyles she wanted to be turned into humans and turned Goliath's group into humans, which made Demona angrier until Puck pointed out that, as humans, Goliath's group would be easier to defeat. However, Gargoyle Eliza helped them to defeat Demona. After the Gargoyles released Puck from her grasp, he granted Demona a final wish: no longer turning stone at sunlight. He twisted the wish by turning her human instead of stone, much to her horror.
• In Disney's The Sword in The Stone, Madam Mim immediately sets ground rules for her Shapeshifter Showdown with Merlin, among which is this: "No make-believe things," specifically, "Pink dragons and stuff." Of course being a foul cheat, she never had any intention of following them including at the climax when she becomes a purple dragon. When Merlin tries to call her out on this, she simply responds with, "Did I say 'No purple dragons?' Did I!?" Of course, the "and stuff..." part of her "rules" clearly implies she did, but she's beyond caring at this point.
  • She has no loophole to excuse her turning invisible, though.
• The Fairly Odd Parents. Timmy and his friends are stuck in a horrible military school and his Fairy God Parents are trapped, in a vulnerable state at the end. With missiles pointed at them. They simply go around the last obstacle.
  • Also Timmy pretty much always defeats the pixies using a loophole in one of their ironclad contracts.
  • In the episode where Timmy ran away from home, Cosmo and Wanda took him to a carnival-themed park instead of a circus. Circuses are bound by certain child labor laws carnivals don't have to obey ("they barely obey the laws of physics!") or so Cosmo told Timmy when he explained it was not a circus.
  • In it's Live Action Adaptation, A Fairly Odd Movie Grow Up Timmy Turner, Timmy is 23, and, according to "Da Rules", he was supposed to had lost Godparents when growing up, but he manages to keep them by living like a child(still living with parents, going to school...).

• In Xiaolin Showdown the monks in training are faced with a circular obstacle course that they must complete by taking a small statue off a pedestal at the end. All of them compete for the best time until Clay looks at the obstacle course for a few moments and then turns around and takes the statue, setting an unbreakable record. In Zen (sorta) tradition this is the correct result, and their master confirms this.
  • Similarly Jack and Omi had a showdown in which they had to get to the end of an obstacle course with a glass of water "Without spilling a single drop". So Omi held the water in his mouth for the last leg of the course and ran.
  • Happens quite frequently in the show, actually. For example, the challenge in which the monks need to steal a small idol from Master Fung. Master Fung then decides to smash the idol, preventing the monks from being physically able to win the challenge.
• Hey Arnold had the thrice held-back student on a 4th-grade against 5th-grade football game. The student is...well, let's just say they had to bring the class picture to prove it. Of course, it backfires when he trips and twists his ankle thirty seconds after the game starts.
• In a "U.S. Acres" segment of Garfield and Friends, Roy Rooster goes on the Buddy Bears show as "Big Bad Buddy Bird". He becomes the victim of a twisted version of The Complainer Is Always Wrong, getting a sixteen ton safe dropped on his head for having even the slightest disagreement with the group. Getting fed up, he refuses to do anymore acting until the bears promise not to drop a sixteen ton safe on him. They promise, only to drop two sixteen ton safes on him. A later episode has him rejoin them, after having made sure they won't drop any permutation of 16-ton safes on him. Instead they drop other objects, including a much heavier type of safe on him.
  • In "U.S. Acres" episode "Rooster Revenge", Roy's prank victims decided they should play some prank on him and Orson decided the worst thing he could do was "nothing". By NOT pranking Roy, Orson turned Roy's paranoia against him. In the end, Roy was visited by an inspector who looked like Orson with a fake mustache. By the time Orson appeared, making Roy realize the inspector wasn't him, Roy had already thrown the inspector into a mud waller. Enraged, the inspector threatened to transfer Roy to South Pole. The very idea frightened Roy into running away. The inspector was revealed to be Lanolin playing a prank. Just because Orson said "he" wouldn't do anything, that didn't mean "she" wouldn't.
• From the classic Warner Brothers cartoon Gone Batty:

"There's nothing in the rulebook that says an elephant can't pitch! PLAY BALL!"

• Laff-a-Lympics: The Really Rottens were usually penalized for cheating. But in the free-form pole-vaulting event, they were allowed to participate as a several-story-tall human tower. As the Rottens made their run, the announcer reminded us that "This is free-form vaulting. That means anything goes! So, as ridiculous as this looks, it is NOT considered cheating!" Cue the Rottens' usual villainous cheering.
  • In another episode, there was a kangaroo race and the Really Rottens used a mechanical kangaroo instead of a real one. However, it wasn't considered cheating because "a kangaroo is a kangaroo". They won but, when it was revealed that Dirty and Dastardly Dalton were with Mumbly in the kangaroo, they were disqualified anyway because they couldn't have more than one athlete riding their kangaroo.
  • In yet another episode, there was a three-legged race and the Really Rottens were running on a treadmill attached to a vehicle driven by Dread Baron, who tried to pass it as a legit strategy because all the rules required was that they runned on three legs during the race course. However, they were disqualified and lost 25 points for it and another 25 points for forging the rule book Dread Baron presented to trick the judges into thinking the trick was legal.
• In an episode of Angela Anaconda, Angela is forced into a pogo competition for charity. Despite her lack of skill, she manages to beat Nannette (in fundraising, even though she fails to break her jump record) by using two sticks at once - there was no rule against "double sticking".
• In the Stoked! episode "Boards of Glory", Reef and Broseph compete in the tandem surf competition after lo discovers that there is nothing the rules that specifies that the pair must be male and female.
• In the Kids From Room 402 episode "Mrs. McCoy's Baby Boy", Nancy learned that Jordan is wealthy but doesn't want anyone to find out out of fear they'll think she's some kind of Rich Bitch. Nancy promised not to expose Jordan's secret. However, she started bragging to her friends about having a rich friend.
• In the Futurama episode "A Head in the Polls", Richard Nixon's head ran for President of the Earth. A reporter asked him about the rule stating that nobody can be elected more than twice as such, he displayed his new robotic body and "admitted" that "no body" can.
  • Which is kind of nonsensical anyway, seeing as the 22nd Amendment actually says "no person" and that was the United States Constitution and presumably the Earthican Constitution wouldn't apply.
• One episode of The Secret Show featured a clown who ran for the title of "World Leader". His strategy consisted of renaming himself after the ballot's instruction of where to insert the X and count on confused voters. Not only the strategy was declared legal, but it WORKED!
• In one episode of Rugrats, Angelica's mother told her not to be mean to the other kids or she wouldn't get the new doll accessory she wanted. When she heard about people hiring assistants to do for people things they can't do themselves, she decided to pick a kid to be her assistant and be mean to the others on her behalf because she couldn't be mean herself. Her mother caught her showing her "assistant" how to be mean, the plan backfired.
• Phineas and Ferb are kids, and thus don't have driver's licenses and aren't allowed to drive. Thus, they simply drive vehicles via remote controls.
• Ed Edd and Eddy had an example similair to the Xiaolin Showdown example above, Rolf held a no rules race to see who would get a jawbreaker to solve an arguement while carrying an egg. Eddy cheated, as per usual, Double D made a 2X4 gocart, Ed just hobbled (Eddy had tied his shoe at the start) to the finish, which was right by the start, and won (Ed's egg broke, but Rolf never said the egg had to make it).
• The Disney short The Art Of Self Defense has Goofy attempting to exploit the "No hitting below the belt" rule twice in a row against his opponent by hitching his pants up to his armpits (which gets him punched in the face) and eventually up to where only the top of his head is exposed (his opponent merely pounds him there.)
• In an episode of The Looney Tunes Show, the doctor cuts Bugs off his caffeine. In The Stinger it's revealed that the doctor told him "One cup of coffee a day can't hurt"...so he just bought a really gigantic coffee cup.
• Invoked by Kuzco in The Emperors New Groove, after he has been turned into a llama and goes back on a deal sealed with hand-shake: "The funny thing about shaking hands.. you need hands!" (Cheerfully waves his hooves.)
• Averted in The Legend of Korra. Judging from the response when Korra earthbends during a probending game, it doesn't sound like there are any actual rules about bending an element other than your own (since only one person in the world actually can). The judges insist that Korra limit herself to waterbending anyway.
  • Technically, I suppose bending an element other than your own would be a uniform violation. You can't dress an earthbender as a waterbender in order to get around the rule that you have to have one bender of each element, identifiable by the uniform.

Real Life

• Anyone that has circled 'X' when teachers told you to find it. Mathematicians will surely applaud such an answer...
  • Done by this anonymous Brazilian student: [1] It turned into an meme, but there's no way of knowing if this is from an actual text or just done as a joke.
• Race car driver Smokey Yunick was so notorious for this that some automotive journalists call this trope in auto racing "Yunicking the Rules." For example, when NASCAR rules tried to force more pit stops by limiting the size of the gas tank, Smokey replaced his fuel lines with exhaust pipe, adding several more gallons that technically were not part of the fuel tank. "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'." is practically the unofficial slogan of NASCAR; Yunick just took that to the natural extreme.
  • This is why NASCAR has a blanket rule "Actions detrimental to stock car racing" which they cite with pretty much every infraction anyway.
• Formula One also has many example of creative interpretation of the rules, especially getting around the rules against 'moveable aerodynamic devices' - over the years teams have tried flexible wings and floors that bend in the wind and reduce drag; the Brabham team built the infamous 'Fan Car' where a so-called "Cooling Fan" created a vacuum under the car. In 1981 minimum ride height rules were introduced, to be policed by random checks in the pits. Brabham's Gordon Murray designed a hydraulic suspension system that raised the car in the pit lane (when it was being checked) and lowered it down again on the track. Lotus built the Type 88 double-chassis car, where the top chassis would lower down onto the track at speed creating ground effect suction. Ironically it was the more ingenious Lotus that ended up being banned. More recently in 2009 Brawn GP got round the rule specifying a 'single deck' rear aerodynamic diffuser by incorporating the mandatory rear crash structure into the diffuser, thus generating more rear downforce. In 2010 McLaren built a duct into their car that the driver could operate with his elbow (!); when used on a straight the duct stalled the rear wing and reduced drag.
  • • That trick was banned by FIA in the 2012 rules by an Obvious Rule Patch- which forced the drivers to keep the hands on the steering wheel at all times. So Mercedes (the successor of Brawn) kept the duct but made it so it could be activated from the wheel, using the same button that already existed for the DRS system.
  • Before 1976, no rules said that a Formula One could not have six wheels.
  • At a Formula One race in Long Beach in 1982, Ferrari used a super-wide rear wing on their cars because the rules explicitly stated that all teams could have rear wings made of two aerodynamic elements, so instead of putting them one atop the other, they put the individual flaps of the wing side-by-side to create a wing twice as wide as regulations allowed. The Ferraris didn't place well and were even disqualified afterwards, but Ferrari didn't introduce that wing to win: all the other teams were cheating the regulations in various creative ways and Ferrari, who has a history for being under fire by rulesmakers over the decades, wasn't about to let them get away with it either.
  • Played straight, then brutally averted for Tyrrell in 1984. Formula One rules dictate a minimum weight all cars must meet, but at the time it was common to find ways to reduce the weight of the car while on the track (and unable to be weighed,) such as water cooled brakes that were fed by a reservoir, which would gradually empty throughout the race, shedding weight, and topped up to pass inspection. Tyrrell was the only team with a normally aspirated engine that year, every other team having the dominant turbocharged monsters, and were only earning points due to luck and the skill of their drivers (Martin Brundle and Stefan Bellof.) However, this gave them some leverage against the turbo-running teams, as fuel tank sizes were to be cut to 195 liters (from 220L) in 1985 to curtail the power of the turbo cars. Every turbo team would vote against it (as the turbo engines guzzled fuel,) but to scrap it, they needed a unanimous decision, leaving Tyrrell (with the vastly more efficient n/a engines) in the way, leverage they were more than willing to use. Tyrrell used a water injection system for their engines, clawing back a little of the power deficit, that would be topped up before the race ended with two gallons of water, and 140 lbs of lead shot. The FIA, after inspecting the system, eventually ruled that the water in the tank consisted of 27.5% aromatics, constituted to be an (illegal) addition fuel source, as well as illegally taking on addition fuel during the race, illegal fuel (the water/lead mix,) illegal fuel lines (the lines to the engine,) and improperly secured ballast (the lead shot.) As a result, the FIA excluded Tyrrell from the championship that year, and retroactively disqualified them from all races that year. However, additional testing showed the water carried well below 1% aromatics, and thus well within the rules. Tyrrell also argued that the rules required that ballast be fixed as to require tools to remove, which they felt was the case for the lead shot trapped in the tank. As such, they went to appeal. In an unbelievably draconian move, the FIA ignored the test results, changed the charges to fuel in the water and illegal ballast, and then added an entirely new charge of illegal vents in the undertray, claiming they violated rules preventing the use of ground effect, but where eventually found to be of no aerodynamic purpose. Oh, and the exclusion was upheld, and a further ban from the final three race was instituted, incurring an additional fine for missing those races. This ended up being a double-whammy for Tyrrell, as the turbo teams were now free to amend the rules as they wished, while Tyrrell scrambled to secure a deal for turbo engines for 1985, and also lost all their points for the championship, losing the subsidized travel costs their points haul would have earned them, an addition cost.
  • Another classic rule bend came from F1's near cousin Indycar (back before the 'Split' and today's spec series, when teams often built their own cars). 1994 Indy 500 rules allowed pushrod engines higher turbo boost levels, ostensibly to encourage engines based on road car engines. Except nothing in the rule book actually specified the need for a stock block, so Penske Racing commissioned a custom Ilmor-Mercedes pushod engine that pumped out 200hp more than rivals and walked the race.
• Texas oilman, race car driver and engineer Jim Hall was the creator of Chapparal Cars and created the legendary Can-Am monster, the 2J. At the time there were no rules that prohibited a Can-Am racing car from having more than one engine, so he took a Chevy V-8 and powered the boxy 2J's rear wheels with it and took a snowmobile engine to power a set of rear-mounted fans to suck the car to the ground with. When it wasn't broken down it was an amazing car, and when it wasn't broken down or winning, it was being banned.
• The IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) has a separate yearly award for "worst abuse of the rules", which is awarded precisely for invoking this trope. Obviously, this means the rules will be amended for the next year. For instance, one year's winner is the world's shortest self-reproducing program, which turned out to be a zero-length program which indeed generates a zero-length output. Therefore, contest entries must now be a minimum of one byte in length.
• The Real Hustle showcased an old hustle which involved betting that some random guy can't do everything you can. Touch your nose. He touches his nose. Lick your glass. He licks his glass. Take some drink. He takes some drink. Spit the drink back out...
  • Another proposition bet shown by The Real Hustle: betting that you can drink 3 full beers before your mark can drink three shots. The only rule: you can't touch each others' glasses. As long as you can drink one glass before your opponent can drink their three shots, you can then put your empty glass over one of their shots, they can't remove it, and you can drink the other two beers at your leisure.
    • "Excuse me, bartender, could you move this glass?"
• Spartan boys were purposely underfed and kept hungry, and could expect vicious beatings if they were ever caught stealing food. The correct solution was not to tough out the pain and weakness of constant starvation, but to develop the skill and cunning to steal food without getting caught.
• A similar idea was that cheating was allowed in Soviet schools. What wasn't allowed was getting caught doing it. If you were clever enough to cheat without your professors catching you, you deserved the credit you got (this was harder than it sounds, because of course the professors were more on the look out for cheaters and had seen just about every trick in the book).
• There is an old story (with several variations) about a mathematician, a physicist, and an accountant competing for a job, and they were tasked with measuring the height of a house as precisely as possible to get it. The mathematician measured the house's shadow and calculated it that way, while the physicist dropped two steel orbs and timed the fall. The accountant looked up the blueprints instead, and got the job.
  • Of course, given variances in build materials and labor, not to mention the house settling over time, that was probably the least accurate answer...
    • However, at least according to this version of the story, the competitors were striving for precision, not accuracy, and the blueprints would probably yield the best results in this area.
• Another story tells of a student who was asked in a final examination to describe how to measure a skyscraper's height via barometer. His original answer: tie a string to the barometer, lower it from the top to the ground, measure the string, add the length of the barometer. The instructor objected, he counter-objected, and an arbiter was called in. The student proceeded to suggest:
  • Drop the barometer off the edge and determine the height by how long it took to fall.
  • Use the similar-triangle-shadow method everyone hates from Geometry.
  • Swing the barometer like a pendulum, and work it out from the gravitic force.
  • Mark off the building's height in barometer-lengths.
  • Knock on the janitor's door and offer him the barometer in exchange for telling the student the height of the building.
    • The expected answer is to measure the difference in air pressure (which is how aircraft altimeters work). It should be noted that unlike the more "creative" methods, this one will provide an answer in meters using only the barometer.
    • The story is often told with Danish Nobel Prize-winner Niels Bohr as the student, but this is an urban legend.Snopes has a page about it.
• Another joke involves a mathematician being asked to enclose a flock of sheep using the least amount of fence. He builds a small fence around himself and declares, "I define the side I am on to be the outside."
• At one point, the election rules for the Cambridge Union stated that candidates were allowed to put up one poster in the Union lobby but it had to be a certain size and it had to be "monochrome." One law student complied by putting up a poster of the statutory size... on fluorescent yellow paper. (He got away with it, as a poster that has one color is technically "monochrome." They changed the rules for subsequent elections.)
• In July 2008, the state of Nebraska passed a "Safe Haven" law, saying that parents may leave a child at certain hospitals, no questions asked, if for any reason they feel they are not fit to care for the child. This was designed to prevent the cruel abandonment and death of unwanted infants. However, unlike many similar laws, this program did not specify an age limit nor restrict its use to state residents. It made the news after thirty-six teenagers were dropped off, mostly by out-of-staters who traveled to Nebraska for that purpose. (The Obvious Rule Patch was quickly passed to specify the acceptance of only infants up to 30 days old.)
  • And then there's the smartass 20-year-old who, hearing that a district judge had ruled that life begins at conception, dropped by every liquor store in town to argue that, technically, the judge's ruling meant he was now over the legal drinking age....
• Finland pulled this on Germany late in World War II. The Northern country was on the Axis side without a formal alliance, saw the writing on the wall, but needed aid from Germany to get out of the war without being steamrolled. The Soviets had launched a huge offensive and the Finns did not have enough weapons and ammo to fight. Germany was distrustful to give Finns their weapons, for obvious reasons. So President Ryti said "As long as I am in charge, Finland won't make peace with the Soviets". The Finns stopped the Soviet advance; then Ryti resigned, Mannerheim was elected and commented "Personal vows of my predecessor do not bind me". Technically, this is true, as long as it was simply a personal vow. Generally on the international system, nations don't act on personal vows.
• It's actually fairly common to declare "no-loopholes" for events that involve a small number of people and simply disallow any attempt to get around the rules on a technicality. Some legal systems allow judges to make effectively the same declaration, generally by noting the difference between the letter and the intention or spirit of the law. However, Louisiana Law is based on the Napoleonic Code meaning that, unlike in other states, letter of the law trumps precedent. Meaning that Loophole Abuse is often played straight. So to speak.
• In an effort to speed up the games, the NCAA changed the clock rule on kickoffs, causing it to begin running when kicked instead of when it was touched. The University of Wisconsin scored a TD with 23 seconds left in the first half, and deliberately went offsides on the subsequent kickoff. Each time the play was run, they would be penalized and have to do it again, but it would take 5 seconds off the clock that were not replaced.
• Seen frequently in fiction, but it does happen in real life: police using various means to get information or confessions without quite violating the accused's rights. The most common one (in jurisdictions where appropriate) is making it clear they are not taking someone into custody or arresting them, therefore not being required to inform them of their rights, specifically the right to have an attorney present. While common in fiction, courts generally take a dim view of this sort of thing if the police are acting like the suspect is in custody, just not doing it officially.
  • Not to mention that they're required to read suspects their rights before interrogating (technically interview) suspects, not necessarily immediately after arresting them. And, at least in the U.S., those rights exist regardless of whether the officer reads them aloud. As soon as the suspect realizes he or she is being interrogated, or that he/she isn't free to walk away from the conversation at any time, the suspect has the right to remain silent.
• One of the most famous sports examples was the notorious 1994 Barbados vs Grenada soccer game. Barbados needed to win by 2 clear goals to advance to the tournament final, but were only winning 2-1 in the final minutes of the game. The tournament rules stated that a draw would go to sudden death extra time, and the winner would be deemed to have won by two goals. After Grenada scored late in the game, the Barbados team realized they'd be unlikely to score as Grenada would play defensively since they didn't need to win, only to not lose by more than a goal. So Barbados fired the ball into their own net, levelling the score, then clustered around the Grenadan net so they couldn't do the same thing. Time runs out, game goes to sudden death extra time where Barbados wins.
• The Underarm bowling incident of 1981 caused a major Cricket scandal when a one day international between Australia and New Zealand came down to the last ball of the New Zealand innings. With New Zealand able to tie the game by scoring a Six, the Australian Captain realized that Underarm Bowling (a completely anachronistic practice of rolling the ball along the ground instead of the usual bounce method) had not been stipulated against in the tournament rules. While a rolled ball is easy to put into play, it is nearly impossible to score a Six, therefore robbing New Zealand of any chance to win the game. While Australia won it was widely viewed in both countries as ungentlemanly cowardice. As a direct result of the incident, underarm bowling was banned in limited overs cricket by the International Cricket Council as "not within the spirit of the game".
• The clever Germans abused numerous loopholes during the interwar period to build up their armed forced before completely repudiating the Treaty of Versailles. (Some of these methods however were actual violations of the Treaty, just difficult to prove):
  • Developing rocket artillery to replace banned gun artillery, and calling them "Smoke Screen Throwers" to boot.
  • Developing powerful, long range, fast "pocket battleships" that could outrun regular battleships.
    • This actually was exploiting a loophole, helped by Technology Marches On - the Versailles treaty stipulated that the largest battleships Germany was allowed to build had to be no bigger than 10,000 tons, which under 1919 conditions would have meant a slow coastal defence vessel. A decade later, when it had become possible to build large ships by welding steel-plates together instead of using rivets, thus saving weight on the hull and enabling them to install a larger engine, thus creating "pocket battleships" possible, which were in effect small battle-cruisers.
  • Shortening the service obligation of soldiers in the army so that, while the army remained small on paper, it was building an unofficial reserve of trained men it could quickly call up in case another war broke out.
    • This had tradition in Germany. When Napoleon Bonaparte had defeated Prussia, he forbad them to have more than 42,000 men under arms. Their war minister Scharnhorst found a loophole, the so-called Krümpersystem: Soldiers were drilled for a few weeks, left the army then, and new ones were trained. Thus, after short time, Prussia had many well-trained soldiers again (knowing about this, the Allies forbad Weimar Germany such a system - their soldiers had to serve for ten years, period).
  • Developing new weapons systems by subsidiaries in neighboring countries and Russia.
  • Developing new tanks as "agricultural tractors".
  • Practicing advanced Blitzkrieg tactics in agricultural tractors.
  • Developing several models of high-speed advanced civilian air transport planes, that, strangely, only had space for 4-6 people and looked exactly like tactical bombers.
    • One reason the rest of Europe allowed this loophole abuse was, despite the fact that German militarization was considered a threat, the huge losses of the previous war made everyone squeamish and desperate to avoid it. And as long as Germany wasn't attacking...
• In American High School Football the A-11 offense exploited a loophole in scrimmage kick formations that allowed all players to be numbered as eligible receivers, thus disguising who the actual receivers were and expanding the number of plays the defense had to defend against from 250 to 16,000. Cue Obvious Rule Patch two years later (though Texas and Massachusetts use NCAA rules, which never allowed the thing in the first place.)
• John Hopoate, a player in Australia's National Rugby League, became notorious for using a rather unorthodox move to make other players more likely to fumble during tackles. Turns out there wasn't any rule saying you aren't allowed to jam your fingers up another player's butt, and in the end the NRL had to declare him guilty of conduct unbecoming the game before they could get rid of him.
• Another real life example: George Burns and Harpo Marx were once playing golf on a very hot day, and decided to take their shirts off. A nearby group complained, and the club manager came out to inform them that club rules required them to wear shirts on the course. A little while later, he received another complaint - this time they were playing without pants. When he went out to tell them to put pants on, they asked to see the rulebook on that - and it turned out that there was no rule requiring club members to wear pants on the course, because nobody had ever thought to need it.
  • Golf is a minefield for loophole-lovers. The general rule is, if you try to use the Rules Of Golf to your advantage, you better make Damn Sure you know What They Are. Because your opponent will. (and in any important case, one can always drag out the Book and/or the official.) Excellent fictional example: "The Foursome", by "Troon McAllister".
  • Similarly, while most cities have a general "no indecent exposure" law which makes it illegal to be naked in public, there ain't no rule against riding the subway in your underwear.
• An English amateur cricket team barred from entering the dining room of the hotel in which they were staying on the grounds that they were not wearing ties. To his credit, the maitre'd apparently took them reappearing wearing properly-knotted ties but no shirts or trousers in the spirit in which it was intended.
• Similarly, when Vivian Stanshall of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band was at school he repeatedly got in trouble for breaking the rule about wearing a tie. He was expelled after turning up in a tie but no shirt.
• The downs system of American football and basketball's shot clock were added when teams took advantage of the lack of such a rule to simply indefinitely keep possession of the ball. Sometimes these "keep away" tactics got really bad; on November 22, 1950, a basketball game between the Fort Wayne Pistons and Minneapolis Lakers ended in a score of 19-18. Another 1950 game went for six overtimes, with each team only taking one shot in each extra period.
• Lord Byron, famed English poet, was forced to send his dog home during college, as Trinity forbade keeping one. Byron's response was, of course, to scour the rules and find that there was no specific prohibition against keeping a bear. Obviously, he got one. When asked what he would do with it, he responded that it could sit for a fellowship.
  • More specifically, the rule was against domesticated pets. The bear was wild.
• Ain't no rule that says a horse can't sit on the Roman Senate.
• Ain't no rule that says a penguin can't be Colonel-In-Chief of the Norwegian King's Guards.
  • And receive a knighthood
• Ain't no rule a bear [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_
• Ain't no rule a cat can't be a train station master in Japan.
• At the time of the infamous "Snowplow Game" in 1982 between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, there really wasn't a rule you couldn't plow a section of the field in football before a field goal. Needless to say, after the game there was one. This game, by the way, is the real reason why Dolphins fans gloat so much over New England's failure to complete a perfect season.
  • It didn't hurt that Don Shula was a member of the NFL's rules committee. This probably produced his familiarity with the rules that allowed him to see that there ain't no rule that says you can't fool the defense into thinking the play's over by pretending to spike the ball to stop the clock, and then pass the ball to an eligible receiver. And, it's still a legal play.
  • Football loves Loophole Abuse, and several plays depend on it. There's no rule that the quarterback has to be the player to receive the snap, giving rise to "Direct Snap" plays that give the ball from the center to the running back with no hand-off. There are rules that state that only certain positions are eligible receivers, but there's no rule that says they can't then pass the ball to someone behind them. There's a rule that says that the kickoff must be kicked at least ten yards or touch a member of the receiving team in order for the kicking team to take possession without ending the play, but there's no rule that says you can't kick the ball directly at one of the close members of the receiving team and get the ball when it inevitably bounces off him.
  • Back when Carlisle Indian Industrial School had a football team in the early 20th century, they were notorious for exploiting the holes in the rulebook. One tactic was to have leather football patches sewn onto every uniform so that every player appeared to be carrying the ball, since there wasn't a rule prohibiting it. They were stopped by Harvard, who when they played Carlisle presented game balls that had been dyed a deep crimson color (since there wasn't a rule against that either) to neutralize the trick.
  • Football has several rules to cover "Palpably Unfair Acts," which serves as a Rule Zero when something blatantly unfair happens that isn't covered by the rules. It isn't applied often, though. Amusingly, the first time someone ran off the sidelines to tackle a runner, everyone agreed that the referee could award a touchdown even though the rule patch didn't exist yet.
• Ain't no rule that says fictional robot cats can't serve as ambassadors in the Japanese government.
• Ain't no rule that says a dog can't be enlisted in the Royal Navy.
  • Ain't no rule that a cartoon character can't serve in the Marines (as Bugs Bunny did during World War II).
• Avoided by most Internet services (forums, hosts, etc.) in that their Terms of Use specifically say you can be reprimanded for any reason by the owners/moderators. Effectively seals the "Ain't no rule" loophole.
  • Similarly, try reading a software EULA or copyright agreement all the way through. They can be paraphrased as saying "We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and you have no rights whatsoever." The phrase "in perpetuity throughout the universe" is popular.
    • Though ironically, most EULAs are often unenforceable; if the EULA isn't on the outside of the box, it isn't necessarily enforceable by law. This is why, for instance, OM versions of Windows have the EULA on the outside of the packaging. Also, many open-ended contractual things of this nature can be difficult to enforce in court. Also not every copyright law allows to enforce fully EULA. For example in some countries you are allowed to deassemble code in certain cases (for e.g. to make cooperation between programs better) - even if EULA explicitly forbids disassembling.
• Ain't no rule that says a fictional pundit can't run for President. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party of South Carolina decided there was a rule that said all candidates had to be "serious".
  • There isn't a rule about candidates having to be serious in the UK, which resulted in a rock star founding the Monster Raving Loony Party. And harming the political system not at all.
    • Ain't no rule in the UK that corresponds to the quite restrictive ballot access laws in (at least some) US states. Any citizen who can get a few signatures on a nomination petition and scrape together a smallish-deposit can run, and will be entitled to describe his party affiliation any way he likes. There was a real case some years ago where an individual ran as the "Literal Democrat candidate" and drew away just enough votes from the official candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party to throw the election to his opponent.
  • Pat Paulsen did it first, in 1968. Then again in 1972, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 1996.
  • French comedian Coluche also ran for President in the 1981 election - he originally announced it for the lulz and ran a mock campaign but dropped out of the race shortly before the election. Partly because it was starting to look like he had a real shot at the win (which he never really wanted, he was just taking the piss all along), and partly due to pressure from more serious parties or rather, as he later recounted, due to Suspiciously Specific Denial of any pressure whatsoever: representatives from both major parties informed him he had absolutely nothing to worry about from their party; but that he should be wary of the other because those guys weren't above dirty tricks and it would be a right shame if something bad happened to him.
  • The Rhinoceros Party of Canada was a similar group, which just participated in the elections as a joke, proposing things like moving the Rocky Mountains one foot to the east (by hand) as a labor project. In 1993, the Canadian government got fed up with this and required that all political parties pay a certain fee in order to participate... which the Rhinoceros Party couldn't pay. So they declared that everyone should just vote for themselves and then disbanded... then reappeared in 2007 and remain active.
  • Similarly, this kind of thing is fairly common in Brazil. In the past, a donkey and a rhino were massively voted for congress, in their respective states and times. This specific practice of writing a joke vote in your bill died when electronic voting machines came around, but it doesn't stop ludicrously campy or just downright hilarious candidates (who may or may not do that for the joke) from appearing in political campaigns. Of course, they rarely succeed, but when they do (like with the recently elected clown "Tiririca"), the supposed "protest-voting" behind it backfires when splash-votes help other, serious, not as well-intentioned politicians get in charge.
• While in Britain the law is adamant that a motor-bicycle and side-car set is still a motor-bicycle, not a motor-tricycle or a motor-car, they're not too picky as to what defines a motor-car, which leads on to: There ain't no rule saying you can't take your 'B' Licence practical test with a motor-bicycle. The four criteria for allowing a vehicle to be a test candidate's choice for a 'B' licence test (the one a car driver has to pass):
  • A: Vehicle must be capable of at least 100km/h.
  • B: The seat the examiner is to sit in must have an adjustable headrest.
  • C: The seat the examiner is to sit in must have a working safety-belt.
  • D: A suitable area must be made available on the vehicle so the examiner can place his own rear-view mirror.
  • Attaching a side-car to a motorcycle makes it possible to satisfy the last three criteria. If the candidate passes, they are allowed to drive a car without having to have seen the inside of one!
  • In a similar vein, for a short while there was a rule limiting the size of motorcycle you could learn on but no corresponding limit for combinations. This led to firms making what was essentially a wheel on a spring that in legal terms was a sidecar so that people could ride stupidly powerful bikes on a provisional license.
• One year in the mid-seventies, the University of Regina's Anarchist Party ran a frozen turkey as their candidate for president of the student council. And won. (Student government for that year consisted of weekly general meetings open to all students and motions decided by majority vote, over which the turkey presided.) At the end of the year, the Anarchists cooked and ate their president. Possibly U of R's charter was amended to prevent this reoccurring.
• When ABC bought the Fox Family Channel in 2001, they apparently had a legal staff that rubber-stamped the deal and didn't look at the contract closely. At the time the plan was to use the network as sort of a clone of FX-esque Rerun Farm in the style of ABC (this was long before FX struck gold with The Shield and when using cable networks to "repurpose" reruns was in vogue), and it was proposed that the channel be renamed "XYZ", which would stand for the end of the alphabet. Closer research of the contract though reminded everyone that Pat Robertson once owned the channel, and when he sold the channel to Fox he threw in all kinds of legal language which meant he kept three hours of airtime a day on the network that could not be removed from his control, and that the moment "Family" was stripped from the name, every single deal made with every single cable system was null and void, and Disney would be stuck having to renegotiate with every system to get back on, which for any basic cable network would be a disastrous proposition.
  • Thus, "XYZ" was ditched, the channel flailed for awhile, getting by with reruns of Whose Line Is It Anyway, ~7th Heaven~, and Gilmore Girls, along with reality shows that were rightfully rejected by every other network, until a smart marketer realized that if you made the network's slogan "A new kind of family" and emphasized it as much as the network name, you could easily wiggle around what Pat thought of as a "family" and expand the definition. Thus the network was finally able to program for more than two kids and two parents, and now programming like Pretty Little Liars can easily lead into The 700 Club, which Pat Robertson can't do anything about.
  • Meanwhile The 700 Club has so many notices, warnings and roadblocks before the show on ABC Family that remind you Disney doesn't endorse his views at all that it is pretty much treated as the Old Shame of the network. It isn't even mentioned at all on the network's website.
• There wasn't a rule for a lot of things in the US Army, until Skippy came along. And some where he was quite surprised to find there was a rule.
• There was no rule in cricket about bodyline bowling, where the fielding team repeatedly bowls fast short deliveries aimed at the batsman's body, whilst setting a field with a high number of close legside catchers in the hope of catching deflections when the batsman defends himself. The England cricket team used this method to counteract the success of the great Australian batsman Sir Donald Bradman during the 1932-33 Ashes. After the infamous tour bodyline was effectively banned by changing the Laws of Cricket to limit the number of fielders allowed behind square leg, and adding that "The bowling of fast short pitched balls is dangerous and unfair if the umpire at the bowler's end considers that by their repetition and taking into account their length, height and direction they are likely to inflict physical injury on the striker."
• Reader's Digest once printed this apocryphal story about a Cricket Rules match somewhere in England:

The captain of the batting team was facing the first ball of the innings, with the opposing captain as wicketkeeper. The ball was almost a wide down the leg side, but broke back viciously and bowled him out. The astonished batsman exclaimed, "Well, I declare!" The opposing captain overheard and took him at his word, so the innings was closed at one for naught. After the teams changed round, the first bowler began running round and round the boundary with no apparent intention of stopping. When asked what was going on, the captain of the fielding side explained to the umpire, "There is no rule limiting the length of the bowler's run. He's the local marathon champion, and he's running until bad light stops play". The match was drawn with one ball bowled.

• This is an essential part of nine-ball pool. The balls are numbered from 1 to 9, the rules state that you must strike the lowest-numbered ball on the table, and the winner is the player who pots the 9-ball. This implies that the intent is to first pot the 1-ball, then the 2-ball, then the 3-ball, and so on until you pot the 9-ball and win. However, there Ain't No Rule saying the balls must be potted in order, so play often involves striking the lowest-numbered ball into the 9-ball and attempting to pot the 9-ball, or into any other ball to keep shooting.
  • This is also used as a tactical move when you can't easily pot any ball by hitting the lowest first. If you don't hit the lowest ball, the other player can place the cue ball anywhere on the table which usually means a setup for an easy shot. If you do hit the lowest but don't pot anything, the other player will have to shoot from where the cue ball ends up, which ideally is in a position where they will foul and you'll get the cue ball back anywhere on the table. In some games you can get the players making incredibly accurate finesse shots one after the other trying to get the other to foul.
• In 1980s Japan, there was a rule banning the uncensored display of the penetration of a vagina by a penis. However, there was no rules against phallic tentacles doing so, or anything made of plastic, or even a non-human penis...
  • And before that, censorship laws only forbade the display of pubic hair; genitals were, technically, okay. You can see where this is going...
  • Likewise, the used schoolgirl panties started being sold in vending machines because there wasn't a law on the books restricting it.
    • At least one creative jurisdiction managed to regulate their sale under laws governing "Artifacts and used goods."... which just meant pawnshops and similarly licensed buisness got into the act.
    • When Ebay and other online retailers banned their sale, some schoolgirls switched to selling a photo of themselves with the panties thrown in for free.
• In casinos offering Blackjack, it has always been prohibited to use any device to count or track the cards. People eventually found ways to count cards in their heads (and won huge amounts of money doing it). Since using your brain to gain an advantage in a game isn't illegal, casinos can't have you arrested for cheating. But since a casino is private property they can decline to accept any wager and can therefore boot out anybody suspected of counting cards.
  • This sometimes turns into getting booted if you're doing "suspiciously" well, so even if you aren't counting cards and just happen to be phenomenally lucky, be prepared to be shown the door.
• At one of the Winter Olympics, Canadian Skiers didn't know there was a rule against "tobogganing", or slowing yourself using your bottom. When they did this, other athletes immediately complained to the judges, who opened that year's rulebook to cite against this maneuver --- and discovered it had been accidentally omitted...
  • Norse Law used to work like this. Each year the laws were read out (about 1/3rd a year) and if a law was left out and no one made a point of it that law was removed.
• Vancouver 2010 Olympics: Ain't no rule in ice dancing that you can't put belts into your costumes to help with lifts (this is the same Russian pair with the "Aboriginal" costumes). As commentator Scott Hamilton noted, there undoubtedly will be in the future.
  • Likewise, in the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, ain't no rule you can't prolong your dance by not touching the ice with your skates for the first eighteen seconds. Said loophole abuse resulted in the only perfect-scoring ice dance in the history of the Olympics: Torvill and Dean's "Boléro".
    • To clarify, "Boléro" itself is 17 minutes long. They managed to cut the song down to 4:28, 18 seconds longer than the Olympic rules. Since actual timing starts when the skates touch the ice, they went with Loophole Abuse.
    • Needless to say, this is now against the rules. Though ice dance in general is prone to teams creating unusual moves, where there ain't no rule, leading to next season there being a rule.
• Another Olympics one: Canadian Ross Rebagliati was stripped of his gold medal when traces of marijuana were found in his system. However, marijuana wasn't actually on the banned substances list, so they gave it back to him. Then again, marijuana isn't exactly a performance enhancing drug.
• There may be a rule in baseball and softball about teammates assisting a runner, but there's not one about opponents assisting a runner...which led to a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming when college softballer Sara Tucholsky hit the only home run of her career, but tore her ACL rounding first. Two members of the opposing team carried her around the bases so her home run would count. (More complete summary at the Real Life CMOH page)
  • While it definitely qualifies as a CMOH, the umpire was actually wrong. There was no rule that would have prevented her teammates from assisting her around the base path, as it was technically a home run as soon as the ball cleared the wall, which used a different, reduced set of base running rules. (Mainly that you're still out if you pass a runner ahead of you). Still, it makes a better story the way it happened.
    • Also, if somebody hits an actual bona fide homerun then they're quite likely to want to run the bases, whether it technically has to be done or not. It probably wouldn't feel right, otherwise.
• After the devastating casualties suffered from the use of poison gas in World War I, a treaty was signed banning the use of chemical weapons, the deadliest weapons of the day. However, this treaty failed to keep up with technology, and after protests against bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was noted that there ain't no rule against using nuclear weapons.
  • The US had, at the time and until very recently, never actually signed a treaty banning production and use of chemical weapons (including that section of the Geneva Conventions). It wouldn't have been a treaty violation even if it had been chemical weapons being used.
• In a campaign in Northern Africa during World War II, the Germans were upset to find a particular branch of Scorched Earth strategy: every oasis they came to had a sign in English stating that the oasis had been poisoned by the British army. When they complained that poisoning water constitutes a war crime, the British pointed out that there was absolutely nothing forbidding putting up false signs.
• In World War One preexisting treaties banned the use of poison gas shells, but did not ban the deployment from canisters, which had not been considered at the time of writing. The later blanket bans closed this loophole.
• To score a run in baseball, you have to tag home base. Practically everyone thinks of this as tagging the base with your foot, and that therefore if the catcher is already in the way you can't really tag home. But there ain't no rule that says you have to use your feet. During a college baseball game, Fordham player Brian Konwnacki took this to almost gravity defying levels when he literally jumps over the catcher to get to home plate and makes a flawless flip onto home plate to score a run.
  • Also, from that same clip, ain't no rule that says you can't steal third base when no one's looking. (About 1:05 in the clip.)
  • Or home, for that matter.
• Eddie the Eagle utilized a loophole allowing every nation to send a representative for every sport. At the time, nobody else from the UK entered for ski jumping, so Eddie did and was legally allowed to compete. Obvious Rule Patch followed requiring all competitors to have won an international competition previously or be in a certain top percentage in their event.
• When a minor Succession Crisis occurred in Poland in 1384, the Polish nobles decided that Jadwiga, the younger sister of the Hungarian Queen Mary, should become the ruler of Poland. One problem: Polish law made no provision for a ruling queen (queen regnant); all previous female Polish leaders (including Jadwiga and Mary's mother Elisabeth) had been The Woman Behind The Man. On the other hand, they found (to their surprise, no doubt) that there was nothing that said the King of Poland had to be a man. Ergo, Jadwiga was crowned King of Poland. (She even became a saint; she is known in English and German as St. Hedwig, patron of a United Europe).
• On a similar note, more or less the same thing happened to Hatshepsut: she was crowned King (well, Pharaoh, but the title was masculine) and dressed up in drag (to the point of wearing a wig on her chin and going around topless) after the death of her husband (and half-brother) Thutmose II.
• The Japanese Pancrase Society, a forerunner to modern day MMA like the UFC, had a dress code that allowed for trunks and boots with no other objects or weapons. One of its champions, Masakatsu Funaki took advantage of the lack of rules on personal hygiene and would often keep his long hair in a perm loaded with hair grease making it pretty much impossible to beat him using a chokehold.
• The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, was negotiated in the wake of World War One by the remaining major naval powers (Britain, the United States, Japan, France and Italy) to prevent another naval Arms Race like the one preceding the war (and believed by many to have contributed to it). It was extended with few changes by the London Naval Treaty of 1930. With few exceptions it entirely prohibited battleship and battlecruiser construction for 10 years, and carefully prevented aircraft carriers (which had yet to be developed into truly viable combatants) from being constructed as battleships in all but name. As a result, cruisers became the primary focus of the world's major navies. Much effort was put into avoiding loopholes, but a significant one was overlooked by the negotiators (but not by the naval designers): while both heavy cruisers (defined as being armed with 8-inch guns or smaller) and light cruisers (armed with 6.1-inch or smaller guns) were limited in size, only heavy cruisers were limited in number, and the size limit was the same for both types. As a result, the three largest navies (US, British and Japanese) all decided that, once they reached their limits on heavy cruisers, they would built very large "light" cruisers, using essentially (or in Japan's case, entirely) identical hulls to the heavy cruisers, that would make up for their smaller guns by carrying a lot more of them. While heavy cruisers were armed with an average of 9 8-inch guns, the US and Japanese "light" cruisers were armed with 15 6-inch or 6.1-inch guns. The British "light" cruisers were originally going to as well, but were cut to 12 6-inch guns late in the design process to save money.
  • The Treaty also encouraged loophole abuse of a different sort, with the US at least. The US had few aircraft carriers at the time of the treaty, and the limit on them was rather high. The limit was unofficially increased, since the US could pass off at least a few of these carriers as "experimental" vessels, on which there was no limit. As a result, the US began spamming carriers--a development only encouraged when (after the end of the treaty) many of the Navy's Pacific Fleet battleships were destroyed at Pearl Harbor. And that, indirectly, is why the United States has as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined.
• The American Music Awards abused a loophole of their own in 2009 -- the nominations are based on radio airplay and album sales, and the winners by an online fan vote. Thus, Michael Jackson and his album Number Ones got five nominations and ultimately four wins. The abuse? Number Ones was a Greatest Hits Album released in 2003, and the only reason Jackson got all that airplay and sales was because he had just died, but there's apparently no rule preventing old material from getting nominations. Complaints that nominating Jackson wasn't fair to artists who had brought out successful new material in the eligibility period and that the AMA's were piggybacking on his death for press and ratings were shouted down by fans saying that the AMA rules were rules and this just proved Jackson's superiority.
• Humans Versus Zombies manages to avert this entirely by having the "Douchebag Clause" which states "Don't be a douchebag." Simply put, if it's unfair and not covered in the rules, then the mods can invoke the douchebag clause and punish accordingly.
• Cracked has some examples.
• This is probably the reason why there are so many "dumb laws"; laws in areas like "no pet crocodiles on the street" or "it's illegal to bathe a donkey". Someone abused a loophole, and the city/county/etc. had to implement a law that would make future generations wonder "wtf"?
• Adam Hills, a comedian, has an artificial foot. He can drive, but his license stipulates that he "must wear [his] artificial right foot" while doing so. As Adam points out: "...doesn't say where."
• In combat sports, a title cannot change hands unless it is contested within its weight class - if either competitor is overweight, even if the challenger wins, the title remains with the champion. Several champions, expecting to lose, have come in overweight, lost, and retained the title. Paulo Filho, then of WEC, comes to mind.
  • The World Boxing Association (one of the Big 4 sanctioning bodies) since closed this loophole with Rule 2.5, part of which states that if the champion fails to make weight, he loses his title "on the scales" regardless of the match's outcome.
• An ingenious German man has gotten around the EU's ban on high wattage lightbulbs by importing and selling them as "heaters"; since 95% of the bulbs' actual ouput is in heat, this is perfectly legal.
  • That particular loophole was intentional, to allow for heat-lamps for terrariums and such. He's still abusing the hell out of it, though.
  • He did not get away with it. They called him out on the similarities of his so called heating-device with lightbulbs.
• National Hockey League coach Roger Neilson was infamous for his knowledge of league rules and loopholes, to the point that he became known as "Rule Book Roger." He once put a defenseman in goal for a penalty shot (goalies can't leave the net to bodycheck a shooter off the puck, but defensemen can), forced nearly continuous penalties to relieve pressure on his team (no matter how many penalties a team has, only two players of five can be in the penalty box), and had his goalies leave their sticks in the goalmouth when pulled for an extra attacker, to block attempted empty-net goals. There are rules against all of these now.
  • To elaborate: The current rule is that taking a Too Many Men On The Ice penalty, or other penalties intended to disrupt the flow of play, in the last two minutes of regulation or at any point in overtime while two men down results in a penalty shot instead of a minor penalty.
• Timothy Ferriss, in his book The Four Hour Work Week, tells a story about how he won a kickboxing championship using a method that he described as Loophole Abuse. The rules said that a player who leaves the ring automatically loses, and the competitors weigh in one day before they actually have to fight. So he dehydrated himself (with the help of a doctor) to temporarily "lose" a significant amount of weight during the day before the weigh-in and regain it, and then proceeded to shove all of his less massive opponents out of the ring.
• All who auditioned for Mila Kunis' role in ~That '70s Show~ were required to be at least 18 years old; she was 14 at the time, so she told the casting directors she’d be 18 on her birthday, but didn't say which one. Though they eventually figured it out, the producers still thought she was the best fit for the role.
• There ain't no rule against some kinds of faking in football.
• In 1992, a sixteen year old high-school student was elected to a circuit court judicial seat in Idaho. It seems no one ever got around to adding a requirement for a law school degree, or even an age requirement, to the laws regarding state judges. He ran on a whim, and was rather surprised when he was actually elected. The boy served two years on the bench, mostly overseeing traffic cases, and according to all accounts wasn't all that bad a judge.
  • In fact, most posts in US elections have only the barest minimum of requirements. Residency is usually the only one, with age being second most common. Technically, anyone who fills these requirements is "qualified" to run for the office.
    • Though this comes from one of the basic ideas that anyone can and should be able to run for office rather than limiting office to nobility or what have you. However, many such positions, such as attorney general and judge, do have additional requirements, such as "must have actively practiced law for at least X years prior".
  • There are, in fact, no qualifications whatsoever to be A JUSTICE ON THE US SUPREME COURT (beyond the fact that you must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate). Children, noncitizens, felons, or even nominating yourself is fair game (though you can't be President and a Justice at the same time; you'd have to resign from the Presidency).
  • Similarly, there is no qualification necessary to be elected Pope except being a Roman Catholic male. The Papal Conclave would never elect anyone other than a Cardinal, but there's nothing stopping them from electing some random Catholic man as the Pope.
• The "Net Neutrality" bill.
• One exercise used in the Canadian Forces Officer Training Course from time to time setting up a rope bridge across a river consisting of a single rope to walk on and another to hold on to. As can be imagined, getting across such a structure is difficult. In one case, the officer in charge of evaluating the officer-cadets was a jerk who insisted the entire group get across even thought the ropes were stretching to the point it was nearly impossible, and if someone slipped (but was held up by their safety carabiner), they were to be hauled back by their safety line and forced to try again. One cadet who slipped halfway across, before he could be hauled back, pulled his legs up over the top rope and pulled himself across the rest of the way. Realizing they were only told to get across the rope bridge, not that they had to walk across it, the remaining cadets were very quickly dragged across as they hung from the upper rope.
• US federal tax law requires that whenever a gambler wins $1,200 or more on a single bet on any casino gambling machine, the win must be paid by hand and both the casino and the winner must fill out tax forms regarding the money won. Slot machines are often designed to make things easier by modifying the pay tables to replace all instances of $1,200 with $1,199. (For example, if a certain combination pays $400 for a $1 bet, the same combination on a $3 bet would pay $1,199 instead of $1,200.)
• The ATF used to define a machine gun as a gun that fires more than one bullet per pull of the trigger. The Sputter Gun has no trigger. The ATF caught on and changed the wording. Also, they sometimes tried to "catch" what obviously is a faulty semi-auto (some mechanisms can shoot twice when worn -- not that they're safe enough to be useful at this stage) under this.
  • Every now and again some bright spark tries to exploit the current law concerning machine guns. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for a civillian to transfer a machine gun not registered at teh time that the registry closed permanently in 1986. However, there is no rule against building such a gun for yourself, so long as you do not transfer it to anyone else. However, the ATF has No Sense of Humor and loves to over step the Aint No Rule loopholes and just prosecute you anyway.
    • That's still an understatement.
• The Filipino programmers charged with the creation of the highly-destructive ILOVEYOU virus were not charged with anything by Philippine state prosecutors because there were no laws in the Philippines regarding malware at the time. So, yes, they got away with crippling millions of computers and caused billions of dollars in damages worldwide because the Philippine justice system was behind the times -- something Filipinos old enough to remember the hubbub view with a peculiar mix of misplaced pride and sheepish embarrassment.
• Broadcaster Keith Olbermann "barely graduated" from Cornell after realising that he needed to take 28 credits in his last semester. The university authorities assumed there was a rule against this - there wasn't, but he was the first person mad enough to try it.

(waiting to hear if he graduated) Did you know you can sweat from your eyelids?

• In Japan gambling is illegal. So you can't exchange the balls you win in a Pachinko parlor for cash. But technically, the parlors only let you exchange the balls for various items which can be taken to another nearby store who would then "buy" the items.
  • Heck, that's why poker chips, slot-machine tokens, and paper tickets won at fairs were invented in the first place: they're a way to sidestep gambling laws.
• Wanna bribe a politician, but don't want to go to jail? Simple! Lobbying. It's been said that there are ten ways to bribe a crooked politician, and a hundred ways to bribe an honest one.
• The advance of technology allows crazy abuses when the law fails to predict certain acts could ever be possible. Example: it is currently legal to program a computer to buy and sell stock for you. Therefore, it is legal to program it to buy stock in New York and immediately sell in Chicago during the split-second intervals when the two exchanges are out of sync on that stock's value.
• A British schoolboy was annoyed when he found out that boys weren't allowed to wear shorts in hot weather, so he looked up the uniform rules, and found there was no rule against boys wearing skirts. Full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-13362586
• A rare positive example, Nintendo actually used R.O.B to get the NES into the American market: America was still reeling from The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, and no toy store would dare market a product as a "video game". R.O.B., however, allowed Nintendo to make the NES look much more toy-like and less like a video game console, and convinced toy stores to stock it.
• No rule says a woman can't be a yeoman: http://www.navygirl.org/navywomen/navy_women_history_page.htm
  • On Star Trek anyway, it seems that only women can be yeomen.
• No rule says a woman can't be prom king: http://www.komonews.com/news/archive/4004466.html
• No rule says a man can't be prom queen: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/28/local/me-prom-queen28
• No rule says a boy can't be carnival queen: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-406773/Only-gay-village-carnival-queen.html
• In US states where the minimum gambling age is 21 (including Native American casinos), there are bingo variety slot machine casinos where you only have to be at least 18 to play (same as tournament bingo). The slot machines' winning combination is determined by the outcome of your current bingo card rather than just the slot spin meaning that you're playing the bingo card upon activation of a spin, thus lowering the legal age.
• There are a number of blind spots where some places in the united states lack any law specifically forbidding underage strippers from performing live, like mentioned here.
• The Troper Tales for Complaining About Shows You Don't Like was removed because it became nothing but huge complaints and was often one big Flame War after the next. Several other tropes devolved into Complaining About Shows You Don't Like in the Troper Tales section. So people turned to the Headscratchers (At the time called "It just bugs me") and let the complaining and flame wars begin.
• In medieval Germany serfs couldn't carry swords, but as a sword was defined as (among other requirements) being double bladed, nothing stopped really big knifes, as long as they were single bladed.
• Ain't no rule saying states can't award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
  • There is, however, a rule that States can't form Compacts or Agreements without the consent of Congress.
  • For that matter, there ain't know rule saying that you have to vote for a member of the electoral college based on who they'll vote for. The intent was for you to vote for someone smart enough to know who really should be president, but no state does that anymore.
• Israel once offered awards to "Heroine Mothers," women who gave birth to 10 or more children. There was no rule, however, that said the mothers had to be Jewish. The practice was stopped after Arab women kept winning, threatening Israel's status as a Jewish state.
• This is how the American legal system works. The law code does not cover what is legal; it only defines what is illegal. If the law say nothing about something, then you can technically do it legally.
• After 9/11, France made some laws against headscarfs in schools, to enforce their strict separation of state and religion. As you may know, Muslim women are supposed to cover their hair all the time. One very pious Muslim girl was told to get rid of her headscarf, or get kicked out. So she shaved off her hair.
• The hypothetical faster-than-light particles known as tachyons operate like this: the laws of relativity state that it is impossible for something to accelerate past the speed of light. They say nothing about objects that have always been at a faster-than-light speed.
  • More accurately, if you solve the equations for total energy of a normal particle moving faster than light, you will get an imaginary number, but the total energy is proportional to the rest mass, and nothing says the rest mass has to be real.
• A joke involving a particularly unpopular village head goes thus: One day, while he was walking around the village at night, a young man bumped into him, and claimed that he couldn't see him because it was too dark. The next day the head passed a rule saying, everyone walking on the streets at night must carry a lantern. That night, the same man bumped into him again, and showed the lantern to the annoyed village head and pointed out that there is no rule that the lantern should have a candle. The village head made an Obvious Rule Patch the next day, saying that the lantern must also have a candle. That night, the man bumped into him again, and this time the Loophole Abuse was that the rule doesn't say the candle has to be lit. The embarrassed head cancelled the rule on the following day.
• The filibuster, in which a politician prevents a bill from being voted on by extending debate indefinitely. It's actually as old as the Roman Republic.
• In the United Kingdom, there used to be rotten boroughs that had representatives in Parliament even though they had a very small population - the district lines hadn't been been changed in centuries, and what were once large population centers were now tiny villages. It was very difficult to get rid of them because it required an act of Parliament to redraw the district lines. This is why the U.S. constitution requires that a census be taken every ten years.
• Gerrymandering.
• The Westboro Baptist Church basically does this to be real life trolls.
• Math Textbooks. Some of them have the answers in the back so that people can check their answers and see if they got it right. To prevent people from just copying the answers down, they only include answers for every other problem. Conveniently, to prevent cheating, guess which problems are always the ones on the test and assigned for homework?
  • Though some classes, particularly in the higher grades, assign the ones that have the answers in the back so they can check it. That being said, most books only have the answers, not the work, and many teachers require work to be shown and will often assume you just copied the answer if that's all you have.
  • And for the people making the textbooks, there isn't any rule stating how long the edition has to be relevant or a minimum of how much stuff should be changed for each edition. Thus it's common for a new edition of a textbook to change one diagram or one source, while they pocket all the money from students who can't resell the books to the university. (This is why in every college town you see third party stores.)
• Jeff Dunham has mentioned using a method to get free professional photos taken - he used his school pictures. Unfortunately, these wound up in the yearbook.
• In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission implemented the National Do-Not-Call Registry, which allows Americans to limit the number of telemarketing calls made to them. However, phone surveyors are one group exempt from this rule, allowing groups like the Christian non-profit organization The Dove Foundation -- known for the "family-approved" seal it puts on movies appropriate for family audiences (and not to be confused with the brand of soap made by Unilever) -- to do phone surveys and ask for a follow-up call afterwards from their for-profit partner Feature Films for Families, where they try to sell movies to them. That way, they are able to skirt the Do-Not-Call rule. The State of Missouri sued Dove for US$70,000 in 2006 for violating their laws.
  • Likewise, the "Do Not Call" list also doesn't apply to political campaigns, so every two years people complain about getting robocallers late at night or very early morning. This is especially bad every presidential campaign, peaking in 2008 where people reported having getting so many calls at the worst times (Especially around when they're eating dinner) that people reportedly unplugged all the phones in their house so they could get a good night's sleep for once.
• In streaming sites such as ustream and livestream, ads interrupt it. However, get adblocker and they don't play the ads at all.
  • Likewise, people on Hulu often pick the "give me a longer ad and don't interrupt at all" and then use this opportunity to go to the bathroom or go make a sandwich or popcorn without actually seeing the ad.
• Many coupon deals have loophole abuse...or just deals to rack people in.
  • Subway's "$5 Footlong" campaign is full of loopholes. They assume that reducing the sandwiches to $5 that you'll buy footlongs more and will buy chips and a drink to make up for the loss. However, people have, since 2008, learned that they can buy the most expensive subs on the menu that aren't listed as premium, put $15 worth of vegetables and $5 worth of mayonnaise and they decide not to buy chips and a drink. As a result, they then walk away with a sandwich that causes the store to lose money.
  • A few years ago, a practice among certain Starbucks customers was named the "ghetto latte": order a double shot espresso, which is significantly cheaper than a latte, and also ask for a venti cup of ice, which is free. They then dump the espresso into the venti cup, and then go to the condiment bar and dump tons of milk from the urn into it, effectively creating a venti iced latte for the price of a doppio espresso. (Some will even bring the urn to the counter complaining it is empty when they don't get enough.) Starbucks has not so far banned the procedure, considering it technically legit.
• Acceptable Targets can be this way for sexism, racism, and discrimination, but that's really all that needs to be said.
• In politics, those who hold an executive office are often given the power to selectively veto only parts of a bill without vetoing the whole thing. This has been often used to veto individual words or sentences to Quote Mine a bill and create an entirely different bill, for example by deleting the word "not" to completely reverse the meaning.
  • Wisconsin governors are particularly infamous for doing this - former governor Tommy Thompson was known for deleting individual letters and digits, which came to be known as the "Vanna White veto". The Wisconsin legislature has since managed to create two Obvious Rule Patches which disallow the governor from using the veto to delete letters within a word or splice together multiple sentences, but to this day, the governor of Wisconsin can still delete individual words in a sentence.
  • The United States Congress once tried to give the President this power, but the power, known as the line-item veto, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
  • Regardless, recent Presidents have made frequent use of "signing statements" which effectively indicate their interpretation of or credulity for a new law, and the extent to and/or manner in which they intend to enforce it. Such statements, however, are not binding, and have no impact on subsequent Presidents.
• Boise, Idaho has (or had) a law forbidding public nudity unless it has "serious artistic merit". A strip bar attempted to circumvent it by issuing pencils and paper to the clients.
• Privately owned land is this way to the United States constitution. Especially schools - where you essentially sign away your rights the second you enter.
• There are many cases in which an action is illegal by law, or a government agency is required by law to do something, but there is no recourse or penalty for violating said law, resulting in the law freely being broken for lack of consequences.
  • A specific example recurs in Washington State, where the state legislature is required, by the state constitution, to fully fund public education as its top priority; however, no one, not even the state Supreme Court, has the power (or any means by which) to force it to actually do that.
• In online auctions (primarily eBay), it's not uncommon to find automated pieces of software that were programmed to monitor the auction and always bid with the absolute minimum price without the person having to ever actually be at the computer.
• Whenever something is released under a "pay what you like" plan (Such as the Humble Bundle Indie Bundle) a lot of people select the minimum price, especially if it's as low as $0.01. (And plenty of people still pirate it anyways.)
• On art sites like deviantART, pornographic content is against the TOS. However, Artistic Nude isn't considered pornographic at all, so naturally if you look in that section, be prepared to see a lot of pornography that's labeled as "Artistic Nude".
  • Likewise, icons often aren't handled by the mature filter. Some trolls on those sites regularly put pictures of asses or stuff that normally would be placed under "mature" to shock people with the mature filter on. It was less common in deviantART where the icon size was limited to only 50x50 pixels, but on other art sites with bigger avatars....
  • For that matter, "Photo-dumping" is not allowed on some art sites...but people love to take these and then place them under a "Photograph" categorization so they get away with it.
• Related to the above, there were people who had done the Loophole Abuse on Fur Affinity before an update to the terms of service said that x-rated avatars would be banned, too. When it comes to depicting content banned from the site, though, Aint No Rule saying you can't tell people to go check out your gallery on another site that does allow it.
• An old Irish joke takes advantage of this:

Murphy and Flannery hated each other with a burning passion. To help end the fighting, God sent an angel down to Murphy to help nudge him to repentance and reconciliation. The Angel said to Murphy: "Murphy, m'boy, God has told me that you may pray for any one thing you wish, and you will receive it. However, whatever you get, Flannery will get twice as much." "So, angel, lemme get this straight," Murphy replied. "Does this mean that if I ask to be the head of one dockside union, Flannery will be the head of two?" "Yes." "And if I win the Irish Sweepstakes once, Flannery will win it twice?" "Yes." And if I get a brass band following me, he'll..." "Have one in front of him AND behind him," said the angel. Murphy thought for a moment. "All right, angel, I've made my decision. I'd like a glass eye!"

• • Of course, there's further Loophole Abuse to be had when you realize that Murphy never specified that the glass eyes had to replace the real eyes. The angel could just as easily make glass eyes appear and hand them over.
    • A variant has the wisher ask to be blind in one eye, which is also open to Loophole Abuse by the angel/genie due to his lack of specification as to how long the blindness should last.
  • Other variations of the joke (usually with the person getting double being a Lawyer) have Murphy asking for a ton of money, a ton of success, and then to be scared half to death.
    • Or to be shown something so funny he'd laugh himself half to death.
    • Or to donate a kidney.
• More legal Loophole Abuse, Wal-Mart. While this practice is hardly unique to Wal-Mart, they just happen to be the most well-known example of it. The practice in question are to skirting around labour laws.
  • "Wal-Mart full time":
    • In North America, 40 hours is considered full-time legally. They claim to be hiring you for a "full-time" position, and then make you work 36-39 hours a week. Enough to feel like a full time (which actually is full-time in parts of the world, see below) but legally, you are still considered part-time and therefore you are not entitled to any benefits. A lot of Wal-Mart employees are actually eligible for food-stamps and other such public services because they don't hire anyone full-time unless they're a manager or higher-up.
    • They can't do this as much, since 35-38 hours actually would be full-time in much of Europe: in Britain 37.5 hours a week is generally seen as the default, and 35 hours in France. However the main distinction on this side of the channel in terms of rights is between permanent and temporary workers - Aint No Rule against relieving temps for no reason (especially just before three months are up and EU law specifies they get the same rights as permanent workers), or making as many jobs as possible temporary, to skirt around workers rights.
  • Aint No Rule against bumping people who worked legal-full time down to "Wal-Mart full time" after they worked at the store long enough to qualify for more benefits.
  • This has happened to other firms and not just Wal-Mart mind you. Depending on where in North America you live, if you work for four hours, you are required to be given a 15 minute break. Many businesses also use a computer system that keeps track of this. However, there Aint No Rule against the manager telling you to clock out and then clock back in so the computer doesn't record them of being on the clock more than four hours at a tie and saying they need to take a break. There also Aint No Rule against giving you split shifts; but to be fair, many businesses do split shifts so that the "Break" is actually an hour or more and you aren't paid.
    • Or a shift 6 hours and 45 minutes long to avoid union rules that a 7-hour shift gets a half-hour break.
  • There's all sorts of Loophole Abuse surrounding overtime...
• Another common Loophole Abuse that is pretty widespread, but Wal-Mart is notorious for, a practice called "constructive discharge." Most companies would rather have inexperienced and cheaper workers instead of skilled, and more expensive ones. Basically, if an employee is fired, they're entitled to unemployment benefits. However, if the company wants to avoid paying you, they decide to make your life miserable through manipulation of the rules that you will be forced to quit.
• If you are hired as a Waiter or Waitress in America, legally you're allowed to have a paycheck below minimum wage. However, the loophole is that you must be able to make up the difference in tips. This hasn't stopped some places from hiring everyone as a waiter simply so they could get away with paying them $2.50 an hour...and subsequently getting blacklisted by the working force when word gets out.
• When Wikipedia blacked-out their site for SOPA protests, it took less than an hour for people simply tired of SOPA protests to start telling people to run stuff like No Script, use the mobile page, or simply hit "stop" before they were redirected from an article to the SOPA page. Likewise, when other sites do it, there Aint No Rule saying you can't use caches, either.
• Normally, you cannot "Censor" someone with the first amendment...however there Aint No Rule saying you can't censor them through operant conditioning. (Ignore them when they talk about something you don't like to give negative punishment, or give positive punishment by responding with outright hostility.)
• The "Circle Game" can be traced back to 1929. Where the people try to trick you into looking at your fingers making a circle below your waist, and if you see it, then they get to hit you. Originally, this was done in colleges to get past their anti-hazing rules.
• California gun laws stipulate that you cannot have a removable magazine on a firearm with "assault weapon" features, such as pistol grips, collapsible stocks, flash hiders, etc. However, California defines a "removable magazine" as one that can be removed without a tool. To get around this, gun manufacturers made the "bullet button" magazine release. All you have to do is get an unfired round, press it against a tiny button that is flush against some housing so you can't use your finger, and the magazine pops out. This gets around having removable magazines on "assault weapons" because you're technically using a tool to remove the magazine.
• In the United States, it is illegal to sell fully-automatic weapons to private citizens. However, there's no law that says you can't sell a "weapon kit": selling all the parts necessary along with the instructions on how to assemble it. Some gun manufacturers have done this.
• When TV execs want to cancel a show but ratings are high, they can move it to a time slot where hardly anyone can watch it, so ratings go down. Once the ratings drop they have a reason to cancel it.
• There's no rule I can't create an example of this trope here. (Is there?)
• British solicitor Nick Freeman has made it a specialty to get his celebrity clients Off On a Technicality. In response the British press has nicknamed him 'Mr. Loophole'. Freeman's response? He had the name trademarked.
• The Montreux Convention prohibits the passage of "Aircraft carriers" through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits. The Soviet Union, being the Soviet Union, responded by making Kiev-class "Aviation cruisers", which are Missile Cruisers which just happened to carry aircraft.
  • And then they took the trope Up to Eleven with the Admiral Kuznetsov class, which is a full-sized aircraft carrier with an absurd amount of anti-shipping and anti aircraft missiles, and Point Defense Systems.
• In a part of the Holy Roman Empire, peasants were legally obliged to pay their lord a certain percentage of their grain harvest. So when in the 18th century the potato became a new food staple in Germany, the crafty peasants decided to switch from wheat and rye to potatoes so they could keep the entire harvest and resulting profits themselves. The lord tried to get them to pay a portion of the potato harvest, but in vain; the Imperial Court (Reichsgericht) in Wetzlar found that the peasants were in the right. The case is fairly well known in Germany, as one of the officials in charge of the case in Wetzlar was a young Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
• Loophole Abuse was what made The Knights Templar the richest organization in Medieval Europe. As a Holy Order, the Templars were technically bound by a Vow of Poverty, and so technically could not earn money or own property. However, they were able to accept "donations" from patrons and parishioners, and they were able to finagle a distinction between "owning" wealth and "investing" it: managing their donations "on behalf" of their patrons, becoming wealthy as an organization while still technically being able to claim they owned none of it themselves. In the process they created the modern concept of banking.
• In most of the United States, prostitution is illegal. You'd think this would put the kibosh on porn movies where paid performers have sex. However, technically pornographers don't pay their actors to have sex; the pay for the right to film the actors having sex, while the sex act itself is something the actors theoretically do of their own accord. Yes, this line of reasoning actually held up in court.
  • Meanwhile, up in Canada, solicitation for prostitution is illegal, but prostitution itself isn't, leading officially recognized loophole abuse: if a prostitute and customer can arrange a sex-for-money deal without either one actually proposing a sex-for-money deal, no crime has been committed.
• On Yahoo Answers, there's no such rule that you cannot vote for your own answer. This makes it a paradise for Trolls who can easily score 13 points by writing nonsense. 2 points for the answer, 1 point for the vote, and 10 points if the answer gets selected as the best by voters (which is often just one).
• Infamous "director" Uwe Boll routinely abused a loophole in german tax law that rewards investments in film. The law allowed investors in German-owned films to write off 100% of their investment as a tax deduction; it also allowed them to invest borrowed money and write off any fees associated with the loan. The investor was then only required to pay taxes on the profits made by the movie; if the movie loses money, the investor would get a tax writeoff.

Uwe Boll: Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.

• Rule 34 on most art-sites is often ignored...unless it violates site policies in some way. A notable one is that characters who're canonically underage. Cue people drawing the characters as young adults so they could upload rule 34 of them.
• The Japanese ran this as their primary legal argument before the League of Nations justifying their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Their resident international law expert (a Briton who disagreed with post-World War I norms of International Law) ran with the language in the League of Nations charter banning aggressive warfare in sovereign nations by pointing out that the part of China they invaded had been run by a warlord with only loose connections to Jiang Jieshi's recognized Nationalist government. In short, ain't no rule against invading something that isn't really a "country." The argument didn't take.