Just more than one-third of the city’s 1,027 bars will not be able to extend hours during the inauguration due to binding voluntary agreements with their neighborhoods, reports the Washington Post. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Attorney General Peter Nickles confirmed on Friday that no occasion — not even the election of the first black president of the United States of America — is too special to supercede voluntary agreements with neighborhood groups, many of which are 20 years old.

Nickles had some line about “contracts” and “the Constitution” and something about how this so-called Constitution “protects the sanctity of contracts”. This is a reasonable-sounding position to take. Many bars throughout the city struck (and still strike) agreements with neighborhoods as a precondition for allowing the liquor license to pass without challenge, agreements that set terms for features such as live music and weekend hours. Bars that have it on the books that they will not stay open past 3 a.m. on the weekends will not be granted an exemption by the city, as the city will honor those contracts.

So Nickles says this is a simple legal question. But in the same sense, this is a legal question and Fenty and Nickles arguably cannot say pro forma that every neighborhood agreement — without specific attention to any actual contract — is binding and does not provide any room whatsoever for an exemption in the face of a (temporarily) changed law. Those agreements all refer to a legal standing that no longer applies, after all. In Magic: The Gathering these questions resolve in last-in, first-out order and while I’ve not studied District law so closely as I have the finer play using Serra Angels my understanding is that contracts don’t resolve so quickly as by calling a press conference and saying that LIFO rules will be observed.

After all at a certain point there comes a question of enforcement. If during inauguration week one of those 345 bars provided for by some sort of voluntary agreement stays open as is legally provided by city law and neighbors complain, will the District shut it down? No, of course not. The District won’t even have the police to do it.

Not entirely related Google map by rock creek