I am transcribing a letter.  The person says "in a dram shop case".  Should dram shop be capitilized or is a type of description?  I know that I have heard or seen the words, but I cannot put a definition or explanation to them and have no luck so far in my searches.  Can anyone help?  Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!

A dram shop case is colloquial usage or legal slang. It’s used to denote a case involving intoxication. Thus, a DUI case would be a dram shop case. I’ve seen it both capitalized and not. Sometimes "dram shop" is put in quotation marks to denote it’s slang status.

If you want to check, do a Google search on "dram shop case". Mine pulled up 86 hits.

- PW