In 1991, the city of Laguna Beach, California, prosecuted a woman because the picket fence she built in front of her house was six inches too high. The city zoning board targeted the woman even though twenty of her neighbors signed a letter stating that they had no objection to her fence and even though there were forty other houses in her neighborhood that also had fences higher than the four-foot limit. (The zoning rule had been put into effect ten years before, dictating that new fences had to be significantly lower than existing fences.)

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