Walsh

Defendant Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (hereinafter sometimes called “the department”) appeals from a judgment, entered in a citizen’s action, directing issuance of a peremptory writ of mandate restraining defendant from granting an application for transfer of a general off-sale liquor license to certain premises located on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

The ultimate issue presented is one of statutory construction. In applying the prohibition set forth in Penal Code section 172 1 against the sale of intoxicating liquor “with *759 in one mile of the grounds belonging to the University of California, at Berkeley,” shall that statutory distance be measured (1) from the nearest point of the “main” or “traditional” campus of the university (as the department has held), or (2) from the nearest point of other property in Berkeley recently acquired by the university as part of its expansion program and upon which student dormitories have been constructed (as the plaintiff contends) ? We must, in resolving this issue, not only consider the conventional and traditional principles of statutory construction but also, as the problem is apparently one which may recur in differing…