LICENSING CASE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 4000, 21 September 1929, Page 3

LICENSING CASE.

IMPORTANT JUDGMENT,

Levin, Sept. 19

An important judgment affecting the sale and delivery of liquor, was given by Mr. J. L. Stout, S.M;, in the Magistrate’s Court to-day in a case in which (Richard Watts, secretary of a football club, and Evan Jones, licensee of the Levin Hotel, were charged —the former with being on licensed premises after hours and the latter with selling liquor and. keeping the premises for such -.sale dutring prohibited hours. ' Watts purchased and paid for a jar of beer in the afternoon, and the barman placed the jar in a cupboard. -Watts forgot to call for the beer until that evening, when he was found by a constable leaving the hotel with the jar under his arm on his way to a football “smoker.” The Magistrate found that the Court was bound 'by an English decision in the case of Bristow v. Piper (1915), and that the sale was completed by the payment and appropriation of the goods during legitimate hours,.and the information was, therefore, dismissed. “It is tjrue,”- said the Magistrate, “that this decision, opens' very wide the door'to evade the provisions of the Licensing Acts, but that is a matter for the Legislature, which can close the door by decreeing that the contract is incomplete until the purchaser takes actual delivery of the liquor.”