Forget every bad thing I have ever said about beer tickers. Forgive me ye of the notebooks and musty stained cardigans. The law apparently may now accept beer ticking as expert evidence in court:

“Defendant was drinking from an open 8-ounce can of Pakastani [sic] beer containing an alcoholic beverage,” according to the criminal complaint against blond and pretty Brown University student Scout Willis. Trouble is, the mostly Muslim country’s lone brewery, — the Murree Brewery, founded in 1860 and touted on its Web site as Pakistan’s “oldest continuing enterprise” — doesn’t make or distribute 8-ounce cans of beer, defense lawyer Stacey Richman told Manhattan prosecutors in papers made public yesterday. “There is only one Pakistani brewery, and it is not permitted to export beer products from Pakistan,” Richman wrote prosecutors. “This information is derived from direct inquiries with the only remaining brewery in Pakistan,” she wrote. “They do make a non-alcoholic beverage, but that can has an 11-ounce container.”

You can hear the beer nerd in the defense lawyer's board room snickering with that sort of stuffed up nose sound that some allergies and all ticking seems to cause. And, after an hour or two of going on, maybe someone else in the room got the point. The beer is not exported and doesn't even come in an eight ounce can. Sha-shinnngggg!! says the articling student with the beer coaster collection he never mentions pretending clumsily to whip a sword around. Wooot!! says Mr Not Yet Lawyer, dancing over the fact that all those wasted years and each of those 758,938 extra calories finally paid off.

And remember... just because that student at law with the beer knowledge won't get hired back and just because he still can't get a date, well, let's just all remember how the common law advances and changes to reflect society: through tiny almost inconceivably small steps like this. Barely perceptible ones. That's what ticker law is.