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126 Mass. 205

Blaney v. Blaney

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided January 28, 1879

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1879-01-28

Libel for divorce from the bond of matrimony, filed October 20,1877, alleging that the libellee had contracted gross and confirmed habits of intoxication.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1879-01-28

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently November 1955

4 state decisions

20187918801890190019101920193019401950decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Ames, J.

¶1The statute which makes gross and confirmed habits of intoxication a ground of divorce does not undertake to define those terms, and they probably do not admit of precise definition. It does not point out how long continued or how frequent the intoxication must be to be pronounced habitual, or to what extreme it must be carried to be properly described as gross. St. 1870, c. 404. The evidence reported in this bill of exceptions is to the effect that the libellee, for a period of twelve or fifteen years, had as often as three or four times a year yielded to an impulse to drink to excess; that on such occasions he became grossly intoxicated, continuing in that condition a week or ten days together; and that at such times he went or was sent to an, asylum for inebriates; that when the desire for drink came upon him, he could not resist, and that a single glass would bring on excessive drinking, and a renewal of gross intoxication. It was also shown that there had been no apparent improvement in his habits in this respect, and that any undue excitement would make him drink. Upon this evidence, the judge was justified in his finding; or, to say the least, it is impossible for us to say, as matter of law, that his finding was erroneous.

¶2Exceptions overruled.

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