Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

47 Vt. 297

State v. Reynolds

Supreme Court of Vermont

Decided January 15, 1875

Supreme Court of Vermont · decided 1875-01-15

This was a grand juror’s complaint under § 13, ch. 94, of the Gen. Sts., preferred to the city court of the city of Burlington, and appealed to the county court.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1875-01-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently February 1906

5 state decisions

301875188018901900decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1The opinion of the court was delivered by

Barrett, J.

¶2The meaning of the expression, intoxicating liquor, could not be made more certain and free from ambiguity by designating it as gin, or rum, or whiskey, or brandy, or by any other name of a species. It embraces them all, and all disguises of them designed for sale or drinking in evasion of the law, as distinguished from legitimate medicinal preparations, lawfully kept, sold, and used as medicine.

¶3The respondent enjoyed as much scope and facility of defence on the ground that the stuff was legitimate medicine, kept to be *300furnished and used lawfully as such, as if the complaint had specified some particular kind or kinds of intoxicating liquor. The law goes for the genus regardless of the species. If it was of the proscribed genus, whatever may have been the particular species, it constituted the bottom element of the crime. What particular species of intoxicating liquor it might have been alleged to be, would not affect his right or ability to show that it was something besides, and was not intoxicating liquor.

¶4Exceptions overruled; judgment affirmed.

/47/vt/297 · .json · Public domain