Following up on last week’s post about Ohio’s absurd liquor laws, let me discuss some alcoholic beverage law issues from a perennial top performer in the silly state category, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I originally wrote about this in a newspaper column back when I was attending law school in 1998.
It was in that year that I found myself at Lanes-&-Games, a bowling establishment in Cambridge, Mass. I was enjoying a cold Bud Light and trying to show off my bowling prowess to classmates, silently weighing my chances of becoming a successful lawyer without learning golf.
A Lanes-&-Games employee broke my reverie by tapping me on the shoulder.
“You’re going to have to stay on the carpeted area with that,” he said, motioning to my Bud Light.
“What?” It sure didn’t sound like anything out of the bowling courtesy handbook – a book I nearly memorized as a high-school sophomore trying to dodge honest PE credit.
“State law,” he said solemnly, and then he was off to tell some more people to keep their beers off the wood.
Can’t drink beer in the bowling-alley area? Only over the carpet? How could that make any sense?
My finely tuned lawyer brain did the analysis. Every law is supposed to have a “rational basis.” So what was at work here?
Drunk people with 16-pound bowling balls can always be slightly dangerous. So could that be the justification? Well, it couldn’t be that, because making you sip your beer a few feet over wouldn’t stop that.
Hmmm. Maybe state-legislators were worried about people slipping on spilled beer as they are concentrating on their approach. But wait, it remained okay to drink non-alcoholic beverages over the wood. So it couldn’t be that either.
Having mulled it over, I figured the bowling-alley staffer really didn’t know what he was talking about. It couldn’t be a state law.
I mean, no legislature could be that wacky.
Right?
Then I looked it up:
M.G.L.A. 138 § 16D: SALE OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IN BOWLING ALLEYS.No license for the sale of alcoholic beverages shall be granted for that portion of any building or premises licensed for the purpose of bowling, or any game similar thereto regardless of its designation.
Wow. Well, maybe this was a remnant of the aftermath of prohibition. I looked to see what year the law was added.
1962.
More like the aftermath of Sputnik.
Notice the law’s ingenious drafting. The “regardless of its designation” clause would deftly defeat a clever lawyer-crafted end-around of calling the game “schmowling.”
Now, many of you may be saying to yourselves, “What about my constitutionally protected right to bowl?”
That’s an excellent question. And, believe it or not, the Commonwealth’s highest court addressed that issue.
In Marchesi v. Selectmen of Winchester, 312 Mass. 28, 30, 42 N.E.2d 817 (1942), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court observed:
It has long been recognized in this Commonwealth that the keeping of premises for a public bowling alley may be forbidden or permitted under such supervision and control as the Legislature deems appropriate and necessary to protect the public safety, health and morals, so that such a place will not become a source of annoyance and disturbance to the public or a menace to the peace and good order of a community.
Now here’s the really exciting part. After I made the above observations in my law school’s student newspaper, the Massachusetts legislature repealed the law! They took it off the books in 2000.
So I’m going to go ahead and claim credit for that one. Maybe, a couple of years from now, we’ll find out that Ohio couldn’t bear the weight of my sarcasm, and they too will clean up their act.
In the meantime, I hope you Massachusetts readers will go to a nearby bowling center, drink a beer or other alcoholic beverage seated right there at the scoring table, and toast your intrepid blogger for making a positive change in our society.
One of these days I will tell you the sad tale of how I am the unrecognized inventor of street luge.
On a related note, there is nothing, nothing in the world, more satisfying and existence-justifying than to know that because you pointed out the foolishness of a proposed law, the Legislature actually rose up and changed the language of the law to make it foolish in an entirely different way.
I speak from experience. Trust me on this.
M
Posted by: MarcW | July 22, 2008 at 10:47 PM
Go you! :)
Posted by: Betsy | July 21, 2008 at 07:37 PM