Andrew,

These laws do vary from state to state, with the 21-year minimum for
purchasing and consuming drinks.  "Highway money" or some other sort of
federal blackmail must keep all the states in line.  Typically bars have
two official approaches to the under-21 crowd.  Either they are permitted,
but forbidden to drink, or they forbidden to enter.  And then there
are two actual approaches to these laws: follow them faithfully, or
ignore them artfully.

First, the official laws.  Many bars double as restaurants.  At such
places the wait staff are primarily responsible for checking the IDs of
everyone drinking.  Bars which are strictly bars often check IDs at the
door, especially on busy nights.  (Some of these double as
coffeehouses--places to smoke cigarettes and study during the day if, as
here in Iowa City, few people under 25 drink alcohol before 5pm) .  In
Iowa there is a law saying 19-yr-olds are allowed to be in the bar, to
dance and drink soft drinks, at the bar owner's invitation.  Other states
have similar laws.  Some bars will let any 19-yr-old in, others never
admit 19-yr-olds.  In the college towns I have lived and stayed in, I
haven't seen much family drinking, with the notable exception of "football
weekends" and graduation time.  Teenagers generally don't want to be in
the bar with their parents, so I can't imagine any demand for the kind of
certificates you discuss here, although the law permitting admission of
19-yr-olds probably had something to do with permitting such chaperoned
drinking.  (In college towns the parents often live out-of-town, too.)
The local police department hates this law, as they can arrest 100 minors
for drinking in such places every weekend.  Owners of such bars pay heavy
fines, and on rare occasion, can be shut down for two weeks.  But after
fines the bar owners still make in excess of $250,000 a year.

This gets to those bars which ignore the 21 law artfully.  A lot of minors
drink in the states, in the bars.  There are a variety of ID scams.
Students manufacture fake IDs, borrow a friend's ID, enter a bar with an
ID and then contrive to pass it back to someone behind them in line, to
re-use (with the same door person!).  Some students borrow a friend's
birth certificate to have the Motor Vehicle Dept. make a "duplicate" for
that friend with the minor's picture on it.  Now, all the bars see this
happening.  Some wink at it more than others.  Some bars admit any
attractive young woman, thinking this a favor to the over-21 male crowd
inside.  More often, though, friends of the bartenders and wait staff--who
are often only 21 themselves, in big college-town bars--let their friends
use fake IDs, but kick out people they don't like with fake IDs.  Bar
owners generally play dumb.  They are too busy counting money to pay
attention to such things.  When caught, the server gets in trouble.  In
Iowa City, they just instituted a law fining a wait person or bartender
$1,500 for serving a minor.  The bar also gets the $1,500 fine (and the
minor gets a $150 fine).  The fine represents perhaps a good day's profit
for the bar, but a month's wages for the bartender.  So far as I know, it
has mainly been implemented to drive a wedge between the servers and their
friends--to make minors think twice about demanding certain bartenders
wink at their fake IDs.  Servers are rarely fined.

College bars across the nation are probably pretty similar, I would think,
despite the state-to-state differences in specific admission laws.  Having
a large, young staff with about a 100% turnover serving a large, often
economically homogeneous college-age population gathered from outlying
areas, tends to make these places similar in important ways.

I go into so much college-town detail because I suspect your question has
something to do with the so-called "riots" of recent months which have
taken place in college towns, at large bar-like gatherings away from the
bar--e.g., in the street outside the bar, or in a run-down neighborhood
for bar-going transient college students.  These riots are expressions of
the increasingly nasty student-police relations.  As police officers have
been asked to enforce such liquor laws with increasing toughness, they
have naturally come to think less and less of the drunken 19-yr-old they
have been hired to apprehend.  Police officers and college students alike
have unlimited anecdotes of how "rude" one has been to the other in these
alcohol-related interactions (at sobriety checkpoints, public intoxication
stops, ID checking, etc.).  They know how little the students respect
them, and ask "only" that students accept that the drinking laws are fair
and right.  In Iowa City the police have even taken to making their rounds
through the 19-yr-old bars with video cameras, to document the abuse they
receive.  It's all pretty ridiculous.  Improvements in surveillance
technology will force Americans to develop an honest drinking age law.  It
has become much easier to catch minors.  Not only are IDs harder to
manufacture as states increasingly put holograms and so forth on them,
cities are also increasing the police force dedicated to enforcing the
drinking laws (esp. now, in response to the "riots").  And it won't be
long before bars take digital pictures of each entrant's ID, to recall
when the police catch a minor who claims he or she was not ID'ed to avoid
being fined for possessing a fake ID.  (Like workplaces all over the
country, surveillance cameras are increasingly present in bars.)  College
students know they are being denied what was informally permitted ten
years ago, and, right or wrong, they feel entitled to drink sophomorically
before the over-21-yr-olds who could not care less about such laws, as
they continue to understand themselves as an increasingly mature
population.

Jon Miller
University of Iowa