Exploring A Tweet About A 1912 Ohio Supreme Court Case

It’s funny how the Internet works. We here at Abnormal Use have previously extolled the virtues of the @TweetsOfOld Twitter account, which in its own words, “attempt[s] to reveal the lives of our predecessors through the tweets of yesteryear.” In so doing, that Twitter account utilizes “real one-line brevities from old newspapers, as they appeared – or close.” Usually, the folks behind that account offer compelling, intriguing, and occasionally curious moments from periodicals published at least a century ago. Sometimes, the tweets center around some type of legal issue, made all the more interesting by the age of the event being profiled. On December 29, 2012, the TweetsOfOld account issued the following tweet:

“The Ohio Supreme Court says a man can whale a boy for snowballing him. IL1912.”

The alpha-numeric abbreviation at the end of the tweet signifies that this report came from an Illinois newspaper in 1912.

This got us thinking.  If the Ohio Supreme Court made a ruling which made the news in Illinois, surely we could locate that opinion.

We assume that any such ruling would have been issued in 1912, although it’s possible it could have been released in late 1911.

So we turned to Westlaw and the trusty Ohio Cases (OH-CS) database. We set a date field restriction such that only cases between 1910 and 1913 would be searched. The search term “Whal!” revealed two cases, neither of which were the one at issue.  The search term “snow!” produced 11 cases, most of which were not Supreme Court cases and none of which were the opinion in question.

We then went to the Ohio Supreme Court’s official website, and its oldest featured opinions online are from 1992.

After a total of five minutes of looking, we gave up, as other duties called. Oh, the Internet, what crazy errands you prompt.

I entered a time entry for 6.6 on 1/17 in 6694-6.  Could you move that time entry to 3317-209?

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