Blue Laws, a name given to certain rulings or decisions of colonial magistrates reported by Rev. Samuel A. Peters, a Church of England clergyman, of Connecticut, as the actual laws of the New Haven colony. Though one of them forbade a woman to kiss her child on the Sabbath or a fast day, and another provided in what fashion men should cut their hair, they have been soberly accepted by great numbers of people as actually enacted laws, illustrative of Puritan illiberality. They appear in Peters' "General History of Connecticut," and were evidently a somewhat spiteful satire upon the Puritan legislation, which contained many statutes concerning Sabbath observances and the vices of drinking and gambling that would now be deemed inquisitorial. The term is generally applied to any law one does not like that affects personal habits.
Entry from Everybody's Cyclopedia, 1912.