No idea about the most important, but one US law that had massive (and apparently unintended) economic consequences is the IGRA (Indian Gaming Regulatory Act)?
not a lawyer, but I believe this Act was the legal catalyst for the proliferation of casinos on Native American tribal lands ("reservations")
exactly! or break a chair over someone's head so that they fall backwards through the doors and out of the saloon. Every epiosode of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wild Wild West, et al that i've ever seen.
Maybe not far from reality. From Oscar Wilde's Impressions of America (he toured the US in 1882) :
From Salt Lake City one travels
over the great plains of Colorado and
up the Rocky Mountains, on the top
of which is Leadville, the richest city
in the world. It has also got the
reputation of being the roughest, and
every man carries a revolver. I was
told that if I went there they would
be sure to shoot me or my travelling
manager. I wrote and told them that
nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me.
They are miners — men working in
metals, so I lectured to them on the
Ethics of Art. I read them passages
from the autobiography of Benvenuto
Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me.
I explained that he had been dead for
some little time which elicited the
enquiry "Who shot him?" They
afterwards took me to a dancing
saloon where I saw the only rational
method of art criticism I have ever
come across. Over the piano was
printed a notice : —
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST.
HE IS DOING HIS BEST.
The mortality among pianists in
that place is marvellous. Then they
asked me to supper, and having accepted, I had to descend a mine in a
rickety bucket in which it was impossible to be graceful. Having got
into the heart of the mountain I had
supper, the first course being whisky,
the second whisky and the third
whisky.
I went to the Theatre to lecture and
I was informed that just before I went
there two men had been seized for
committing a murder, and in that
theatre they had been brought on to
the stage at eight o'clock in the evening, and then and there tried and
executed before a crowded audience.
But I found these miners very charming and not at all rough.
... So infinitesimal did I find the
knowledge of Art, west of the Rocky
Mountains, that an art patron — one
who in his day had been a miner —
actually sued the railroad company for
damages because the plaster cast of
Venus of Milo, which he had imported
from Paris, had been delivered minus
the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the
damages.
>I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.
