Wisconsin's Sleepiest Law: How Emergency Legislation Accidentally Criminalized Cheese Factory Naps
The Panic That Spawned Absurdity
In the spring of 1934, Wisconsin was in the grip of what historians now call the "Great Dairy Scare." A series of contamination incidents at cheese factories across the state had prompted emergency legislative sessions and demands for immediate action. State Representative Arnold Gunderson, a dairy farmer turned politician from Sheboygan County, was tasked with drafting emergency food safety legislation that could be passed within 48 hours.
Photo: Sheboygan County, via wisconsinharbortowns.net
What Gunderson produced, in his sleep-deprived haste, was Wisconsin Statute 97.42(c): "No person shall engage in conduct that may compromise the sanitary integrity of dairy production facilities, including but not limited to sleeping, resting, or remaining in a state of unconsciousness within fifty feet of any active dairy operation."
For the next 60 years, it was technically a misdemeanor in Wisconsin to take a nap near a cheese factory.
Legislative Drafting Gone Wrong
Gunderson's intention was noble enough. He wanted to prevent workers from sleeping on the job in environments where food safety was paramount. But his language was so sweeping that it inadvertently criminalized everything from afternoon naps in nearby farmhouses to dozing off in cars parked outside dairy facilities.
"The problem with emergency legislation," explains Dr. Sarah Kellerman, a legal historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "is that it's often written in crisis mode with little time for careful review. Gunderson was trying to cover every possible scenario that might lead to contamination, but he cast such a wide net that he caught things he never intended."
Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison, via i.pinimg.com
The law technically applied to anyone—workers, visitors, delivery drivers, even family members of dairy farmers who lived within 50 feet of their own barns. A literal reading of the statute would have made criminals out of thousands of Wisconsin residents who had the audacity to sleep in their own beds.
The Law That Nobody Enforced
Remarkably, there's no record of anyone ever being prosecuted under Statute 97.42(c). This wasn't because Wisconsin authorities were being lenient—it was because virtually nobody knew the law existed.
"It got buried in a massive omnibus food safety bill," Kellerman notes. "Most people focused on the headline provisions about inspection protocols and contamination reporting. The sleeping clause was tucked away in subsection (c) of a minor regulatory section that most lawyers probably never read."
Local law enforcement officers, dairy inspectors, and even district attorneys remained blissfully unaware that they had the power to arrest people for napping too close to a cheese factory. The few who might have noticed the odd language likely assumed it was a poorly worded provision that applied only to employees during work hours.
A Journalist's Sharp Eye
The law might have remained hidden forever if not for Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter David Chen, who in 1994 was assigned what he thought would be a routine story about outdated state regulations. Chen was combing through Wisconsin's legal code looking for antiquated laws that legislators had forgotten to repeal—the kind of "strange but true" statutes that make for entertaining weekend features.
Photo: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via www.frontpages.com
"I was looking for the usual suspects," Chen recalled years later. "Laws about hitching posts, regulations on buggy traffic, that sort of thing. Then I stumbled across this provision about sleeping near dairy operations and had to read it three times to make sure I wasn't hallucinating."
Chen's initial article, titled "Wisconsin's Weirdest Laws," featured Statute 97.42(c) alongside regulations prohibiting the sale of margarine and requiring butter to be a specific shade of yellow. But while the other laws were clearly relics of a bygone era, the dairy sleeping ban was still technically active legislation.
The Bureaucratic Scramble
Chen's article caused immediate embarrassment in Madison. State legislators, already sensitive to Wisconsin's reputation for quirky cheese-related politics, scrambled to understand how such an obviously flawed law had survived for six decades.
The answer, it turned out, lay in the mundane mechanics of legislative housekeeping. Wisconsin's legal code underwent periodic reviews, but these focused primarily on laws that were being actively enforced or challenged in court. Since no one had ever been prosecuted under the dairy sleeping statute, it never appeared on anyone's radar for revision.
"It's a perfect example of how laws can become legal zombies," explains former state legislator Margaret Holbrook, who led the effort to repeal the statute. "They're technically alive on the books, but they're not really functioning in the real world. The problem is that zombie laws can come back to bite you if someone decides to enforce them literally."
The Repeal and Its Aftermath
Within six months of Chen's article, the Wisconsin legislature quietly repealed Statute 97.42(c) as part of a broader "legal housekeeping" bill. The repeal passed unanimously, with several legislators joking that they could finally nap peacefully during visits to their constituents' dairy farms.
But the story of Wisconsin's accidental sleep ban became a cautionary tale taught in law schools across the country. It illustrates how emergency legislation, drafted under pressure and passed without adequate review, can create unintended consequences that persist for generations.
Lessons from the Cheese Factory
Gunderson, who served in the Wisconsin legislature until 1956, never publicly acknowledged the problematic language in his dairy safety bill. But former colleagues remember him as a meticulous lawmaker who was mortified when Chen's article brought the sleeping ban to light.
"Arnold was rolling over in his grave," said retired Representative Helen Kowalski, who served with Gunderson in the 1940s. "He was so proud of that food safety legislation. Finding out that it had this ridiculous loophole was like discovering that your life's work had a typo in it."
Today, Wisconsin's dairy industry operates under comprehensive food safety regulations that were carefully drafted and extensively reviewed. And thanks to David Chen's journalistic curiosity, cheese factory workers can finally take their lunch breaks without fear of inadvertently becoming criminals.
As for the broader lesson, legal scholars point to the Wisconsin sleeping ban as a reminder that even well-intentioned legislation can have absurd consequences when drafted in haste. Sometimes the most dangerous laws are the ones that nobody bothers to read carefully—until a curious reporter stumbles across them 60 years later.