Obstruct

The offence of obstructing an officer, or obstructing process, is committed when the officer Is prevented by actual violence, or by threatened violence accompanied with the exercise of force or with evident means of employing it, from executing his writ. Mere threats are not enough; and on the other hand actual use of violence is not always necessary. Where an officer having a writ to dispossess a person is about to do so, and the person refuses to surrender and threatens violent resistance which he appears able to make, this constitutes criminal obstruction.

United States v. Lowry, 2 Wash. 169.

The words obstruct, hinder, prevent, in the fugitive slave act of 1850 (9 Stat, at L. 452, § 7), mean substantially the same thing. The statute makes it criminal to knowingly and willingly frustrate or retard the attempted recapture of a fugitive slave by his master, or his representative, whether it be by force, active or passive, or by stratagem.

The Christiana Case, 4 Am. L. J. 489, 490.

Obstruction is not such a term of art, in railway business, as to require explanation by an expert; as, for instance, whether it includes a hand-car on the track. Nashville, &c.

K. R. Co. V. Carroll, 6 Heislc. 347.

A fence along a highway is an obstruction thereof, if it prevents public travel from being perfectly safe, although it does not extend across the track. Mosher v. Vincent, 39 Iowa, 607. " Obstruction," as used in Pa. consolidation act of 1854, § 28, requiring the city councils to keep the navigable waters within Philadelphia free from obstruction, does not include a rock forming part of the natural bed of the river.

Snyder v. Philadelphia, 78 Pa. St. 23.

Obtemperandum est consuetudini rationabili tanquam legi. A reasonable custom is to be obeyed as law.

Obtulit se

Offered himself. The emphatic words of the entry on the record in the common-law practice, where one party to a suit offered himself, and the other did not appear. Sometimes found iu the form optulit, abbreviated opp.