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
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