Some Aspects of Liquor Control in California

Abstract

A LCOHOLIC beverage control, involving as it does difficult social, economic and political problems, is both controversial and complex. It is controversial because of the wide differences of opinion with respect to what should be done toward the solution of these problems. It is complex, in California particularly, because of the wide differences in the attitudes toward the liquor traffic that prevail in the several areas of our heterogeneous commonwealth, where the same law is applicable without any allowance for these differences. By mandate of the people,' the State Board of Equalization has been given the administrative responsibility in this controversial and complex field of the law. An attempt was made in the December, 1950, issue of California Law Review to survey the situation under the title The State Board of Equalization and Liquor Control.2 To a substantial extent this comment is oriented about what happened last year to a Mr. Charles W. Hawkins of San Joaquin County, familiarly mentioned in the Comment as Charlie Hawkins. Oddly enough, Mr. Hawkins was not a licensee under the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act, although the author of the Comment assumed that he was. Possibly the sensational aspects of the Hawkins affair were too great a temptation for one who seemed more concerned with these than with the legal problems that are postulated under the California Constitution and statutes in the field of the regulation of the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Perhaps because of a preoccupation with the news interest of Mr. Hawkins' behavior and that of the liquor control officers who accomplished his arrest for selling wine without a license, the author of the Comment neglected to verify the facts as they pertain to the administrative activity of the Board, as well as to complete the legal research that would have been essential to have produced an accurate commentary on the subject. Were it not for the circumstance that readers of the Law Review, accustomed to regard its contents as carefully written and documented, would be prone to accept these statements as facts and the review of the authorities as reasonably complete, no substantial harm would result.