Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/561

533 INJUNCTIONS AGAINST LIQUOR NUISANCES. 533 case, a liquor nuisance might work such an injury to either pubh'c or private property rights that it could be enjoined without statu- tory authority. And if the court refused to act because of the slight nature of the injury, it might perhaps constitutionally be authorized and directed to do so if some injury in fact existed. But there need be no injury at all, and the liquor nuisance statutes neither require nor contemplate proof of any such injury, actual or threatened. They are obviously not aimed at the protection of property, but at the prevention of crime, and by a method which, it seems, cannot constitutionally be employed. The decisions sustaining the acts seem to have failed to draw the distinction between a use of property causing an injury to property which can be enjoined, and a use which is merely illegal, but so far as civil remedies are concerned works no injury and can afford no cause of action of a civil nature. They seem also not to discriminate between the public nuisance of the criminal law, which may consist of the doing of any illegal act which the statute declares to be a nuisance, and the public nuisance to property of which alone equity has taken or can take jurisdiction. Arthur C. Rounds, 70