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236 2 $6 HARVARD LAW REVIEW, Many things enter into it which are brought artifirially or by accident, and the moment they are so brought they become part of the soil.'* And Patterson, J. : "I am, however, of opinion that when anything in the nature of soil is blown or lodged upon a man's close, it is part of the close, and he has a right to it against all the world." ^ The case of Leisy v. Hardin last spring was regarded by some per- sons as indicating an alliance between the Supreme Court of the United States and the Hquor interest, — a view which involved a failure to ob- serve that the doctrine, beside having no peculiar application to the liquor traffic, was as old as Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Brown V. Maryland, 12 Wheat. 419 (1827). A similar inattention to the real scope and meaning of a decision has caused the recent case of Crouolev V. Christensen, 11 Sup. Ct. Rep. 13, to be proclaimed by the press as 'a vindication of prohibition, and hence, it would seem, as evidence of a change of heart on the part of the Supreme Court. How far such a view is from a true understanding of the case may be easily seen. In Tick Wo V. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, a San Francisco ordinance forbade any one to carry on a laundry without the consent of a board of supervisors. No express limitation was put on their power in the matter ; and the court found in all the circumstances of the case, including the way in which the law was administered, an intention to give the board an arbitrary right to withhold its consent at will and by this means to discriminate against the Chinese. For these reasons the ordinance was held to de- prive the petitioner of the equal protection of the laws within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.^ In Crowley v. Christenscn an ordinance required every liquor dealer to take out a license, and for that purpose to obtain the consent of the poHce commissioners. Saw- yer, J., held in the Circuit Court ^ that the facts were not distinguishable in principle from Tick Wo v. Hopkins, and that the ordinance was therefore unconstitutional. As the case, however, was apparently free from any of the special circumstances which, together with the mode of administering the ordinance, indicated a grant of arbitrary power in Tick Wo V. Hopkins, the decision of Sawyer, J., obviously goes further than that case, and seems to lay down the proposition that the absence of express limitation is necessarily equivalent to a grant of unrestricted power. This is, however, a proposition for which Tick Wo v. Hop- kins does not stand ; and all that was necessary for the Supreme Court to decide in reversing the decision below was that the ordinance granted no such power in giving licenses, but only the right to give them on general grounds of fitness and convenience. Such a ground of decision would cover any other business as well as the liquor traffic, and would certainly not have any great significance in the prohibition controversy. And the opinion of Mr. Justice Field in Crowley v. Christensen does not appear to decide more than this. It contains, to be sure, extended observations on the mischief arising from the sale of liquor, but it no- where countenances the view that a grant of arbitrary power to gi^e ^^ 1 There is a French case referred to in 20 Alb. L. J. 299. in which it was decided that a meteorite "cannot be an accession to the land upon which it alights. It belongs entirely by occupation to him who has found it." And Marcade, after citing this case, added, "One can hardly conceive how an advocate could be found to entertain a contrary opinion " 2 The court went on the further ground that even if the ordinance was constitutional on its face, its actual operation under State authority amounted to a practical denial by the State itself of the equal protection of the laws, and so entitled the petitioner to relief. 8 In re Christensen, 43 Fed. Rep. 243.