Editorial/The Need for Public Nuisance Law
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE NEED FOR PUBLIC NUISANCE LAW by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. What is a public nuisance? The question is often put to me now that I have published a book entitled Public Nuisances, and...
...Modern legal practice is of course meant to dizzy...
...To the contrary, I urge that we resort to the law and in the traditional American way, to wit: bring it down hard on our adversaries' cranial vaults...
...Surely idiots like this have never been seen on this earth before...
...They are in a fever about the Fortune 500, the mushroom cloud cabal, the Rockefellers, the Bishops of Rome, Swiss bankers, Jewish bond salesmen, generals, the great pharmaceutical companies, the Mafia, our impending water crisis, Richard Mil-hous Nixon, the end of humankind...
...So can other stimulants, as our balmy era so vividly suggests...
...310, 316-17 (1841...
...No rascal lawyer will succeed in obscur ing their meaning and not even a Supreme Court Justice will be con fused by their intent...
...In English common law the learned commentators recognized the public nuisance inhering in "rope-dancing, gaming-houses, and bawdy houses...
...I must not give them anything more to worry about...
...The question is often put to me now that I have published a book entitled Public Nuisances, and without doubt the question must needs be answered...
...Peter J. Rodgers, having been nabbed while motoring under the influence of intoxicating liquor, was tried as a public nuisance...
...Is this another of those meld-ings of syllables, harmless enough in themselves, but capable of exciting primitive impulses in the popolo minuto and thus imperiling the virtuous...
...After all, there are in this great land persons congenitally fearful that dark and inscrutable proceedings are always underway, proceedings that are all the more inscrutable and menacing because of the little that can actually be discovered about them...
...Their heads were not filled by the Utopian pish-posh that pothers our modern Oliver Wendell Holmeses, and they rooted their opinions in human experience...
...That would be a delicious switch...
...Now here we have come to the heart of it...
...433, 435 (Court of Errors and Appeals of NJ., 1917...
...However, they and like-minded oafs, for instance the surviving members of Common Cause, might want to secure legal counsel...
...I say it is time for the citizens to band together and start prosecuting, and let us start with Ralph Nader...
...For a change, the law is clearly on our side, Public nuisance statutes were written many years ago...
...The editors of the New York Review of Books may unpack their bags...
...Religion, politics, learning, and even amour can make a man lose control of his senses and become a public nuisance...
...The mind fills with visions of recent national political conventions, rock concerts, high-minded protests, and various urban programs like the late Model Cities...
...Proposition 13 was but a sotto voce prelude...
...One finds the charge public nuisance summed up most pithily in State v. Rodgers, 102 Ad...
...wondrously anticipating our modern condition, they asserted that "keeping droves of swine in a city'' could also be a public nuisance...
...In that historic case the late Mr...
...Yet rope-dancing is mild stuff compared with the baleful harangues of a Betty Friedan, a Ralph Nader, and hosts of other such nuisances...
...Let us get on with the task at hand...
...The Constitution will be saved and Beethoven will be given a fair hearing once again...
...certainly they have never been raised up for celebration at the - taxpayers' expense...
...Legal arguments are generally set out in turgid, tedious language devised to confuse, and so to render the judge ripe for a sharp lawyer's pickings and eager to get back to the golf course...
...America has encouraged the rise of some persons who have no profession or calling whatsoever but who regularly appear before us to prattle on about doomsday and peddle their own weird prescriptions for avoiding it...
...I found the term ''public nuisance'' in the annals of the English common law, and in a more civilized time it constituted an offense against public peace, safety, or order...
...If I have my way the charge will be resurrected, and America will end its raucous decline into Latin American political science...
...is anything which worketh hurt, inconvenience, or damage...
...In Burnham v. Hotchkiss they looked to the past, asserting that "a nuisance in its most general signification...
...prosecute them as public nuisances and have done with it...
...The revival of the charge public nuisance will be the main act, and the final curtain will fall on an America returned to prosperity, progress, and tranquility...
...They remain unburdened by the idiotic accretions of modern sophists and pettifoggers...
...they will not need to use their Albanian visas...
...Some call themselves ecologists, others are some species of liberationist or radical or progressive...
...Let some public-spirited Americans hire a Wil liam Bennett Williams tomorrow and watch the nuisances squirm.watch the nuisances squirm...
...What precisely is a public nuisance...
...and today the Republic teems with thousands, possibly millions, of politicoes, clerics, do-gooders, and reformers full of wind and subversion...
...These idiots demand answers, and they will not rest until they get them...
...Give them a dose of their own venom...
...Enough is enough...
...This is the way the so-called liberals have dealt with the citizens at large for years...
...I am not suggesting action in defiance of the law...
...But the learned jurists also looked to the future...
...And the ears echo with countless familiar diatribes of crisis and iniquity when we read on and discover that "collecting multitudes for no useful purpose, but rather to subvert morals" also constitutes a public nuisance...
...They are written in plain English and are unlikely to confuse or to unhorse our modern feeble-witted jurists...
...But the public nuisance laws of yesteryear are lucid and pointed...
...Let the reformers and the haranguers for the New Age be forewarned...
...America has made little use of public nuisance law...
...Rodgers' sad tribulation, but I should remind you that spiritous alcohol is not life's only intoxicant...
...A nuisance becomes public when "it worketh such hurt to the citizens at large...
...Alas, the term has no such power...
...Is the phrase spoken in jest, or have we here one of those mysterious code words used by certain Americanoes to degrade innocent souls...
...And the bawdy house of yore appears as a citadel of high culture when compared with many of our modern universities...
...Over the past year I have personally had to endure public discourses-at rimes teary, at times abusive-from proponents of therapeutic incest, opponents of the flush toilet, and defenders of drug-dependent lesbians, mental hygienists, and Andrew Young...
...A fuller explication of the charge, and one that illuminates its historic foundation in English common law, is to be found in Burnham v. Hotchkiss, 14 Conn...
...He has cost consumers millions of dollars with his quackery...
...Now some will fret that the scheme has about it whiffs of oppression, but I deny it...
...Almost all are arrant charlatans or born fools...
...Why not bring legal action against him and the mob of sleepless lawyers he employs...
...Now the judges of the 1840s were obviously markedly superior to the poor chuck-leheads we have today...
...No gaming house in history has proved so costly to the citizenry as our own Congress...
...After all, as the court so lucidly averred, "a public or common nuisance is any act of neglect, the product of which works an annoyance or injury to the entire community/' I shall not distress you with an account of Mr...
...Not only do we have institutions and individuals today that are nuisances beyond compare, but we are afflicted by public nuisances that have no precursor in all history...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
