Rhode Island law is specific about cold. A landlord must supply heat. There is a minimum temperature, and a season during which it applies, and a tenant who is cold below that line has a remedy that a court will recognize.

About heat, the law says nothing.

There is no maximum indoor temperature in a Rhode Island rental. Not in July, not in a top-floor unit, not in a converted mill with a brick wall that has been absorbing sun since eleven in the morning. A unit may be ninety degrees. It may be a hundred. It may hold at a hundred for a week. The landlord has met every obligation the state has thought to impose, because the state has not thought to impose one.

This produces a particular kind of afternoon.

A tenant reports that the cooling has failed. The landlord comes. The landlord looks at the unit — his unit, installed by him, serviced when he has gotten to it — and forms the view that it is working. This view is the operative one. No statute contradicts it. No inspector arrives to take a reading, because there is no reading to take, because there is no number in the law for a reading to be measured against.

The tenant, who is standing in the room, holds a different view. The tenant's view is not operative.

We note for the record that a thermometer costs about eleven dollars and produces a number that does not depend on anyone's opinion. We note also that no provision of Rhode Island law requires anyone to look at one.

The tenant may then leave. This is permitted. A tenant may sleep at a friend's house, or in a friend's garage, which is cooler than the bedroom and therefore represents an improvement. Rent continues to accrue during this period at the ordinary rate, the unit being, in the eyes of the law, entirely habitable.

There is a reason for the asymmetry, and it is not stupidity. It is 1970. Cold killed Rhode Islanders and heat did not, and the legislature addressed the thing that was killing people. That was correct. It has been correct for more than half a century. It is becoming less correct at a rate nobody has been assigned to monitor.

The Gazette has reviewed the relevant statutes and can confirm that a landlord who supplies no cooling whatsoever, in any month, at any temperature, in any building, is in full compliance.

We congratulate him.