What Our Courts Were Up to the Last Time the Cubs Won the World Series

I’m a big baseball fan. (A Pittsburgh Pirates fan, if you’re wondering.) And so of course I stayed up late last night to watch what turned out to be a thrilling end to an historic World Series. I hate to spoil things for those of you who get all your news—legal and otherwise—from this blog, but the Cubs won. It was, as many of you know, the Cubs' first championship since 1908. That long title drought prompted lots of stories about what was going on the last time the Cubs could call themselves champs—like, Taft was elected president (by men alone, because women wouldn’t be allowed to vote for more than a decade). And there were only 46 states. And radio as we know it hadn’t yet been invented. As it happens, right outside my office is a hallway alcove that includes a set of the North Carolina Reports back to 1907. (Lesser known fact: the Cubs won that year, too.) So there it was: the assembled jurisprudence of our state high court since the North Siders won it all. It got me to thinking: what sorts of things was the supreme court deciding back in the fall of 1908? (That was 57 years before the North Carolina Court of Appeals was created, by the way.) So I pulled the volumes for that next-to-oldest year in the set and took a look. Among the first half-dozen cases: An action for crop damages in a railroad right-of-way in Tyrrell County. A chattel [...]