The State of Our Liberties

...Supreme Court...

...Caughey's book on the place of the mob in American history is a documentary...

...Greenberg's Race Relations and American Law is, in my judgment, the best scholarly book yet to appear on this subject...

...The Supreme Court cannot itself decree the preservation of our freedom, though its contribution is not to be minimized...

...The books under review, all published recently, testify to the concern of contemporary scholars and publicists with the state of our civil rights and liberties...

...This book is a nice combination of modern scientific sociology and the English essayist tradition...

...Gellhorn's book is a broad survey for the general reader...

...Michael Banton, an English sociologist, analyzes in White and Coloured the behavior of the British people towards colored immigrants...

...Three things stand out in this chronicle: the surpassing significance of access to education, organization, and securing the right to vote as the central keys to the acquisition by women of first-class citizenship...

...Especially inadequate has been the scholarly writing dealing with civil rights questions...

...In order to square the latter with the former, he makes a distinction between the abridging of speech, which is permissible, and abridging the freedom of speech, which is not...

...Samuel Dash, the senior author, is a Philadelphia lawyer with a large experience in and out of the government in the criminal law field...

...So far as I know, this distinction is wholly unknown to American constitutional law interpretation, and I suspect that it is just as well...

...The third section, by Robert E. Knowlton, who teaches at the Rutgers Law School, is a fine analysis of the law of the subject, fully explained and annotated...

...In order to squeeze his basic distinction into the Constitution, Meiklejohn invents still another distinction, between the liberty of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, which is absolute, and the liberty of speech implicit in the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which is only relative...

...But as a consequence of the strains arising from the "cold war," scholarly interest in civil rights has quickened, and some gaps in our knowledge are receiving attention...

...He emphasizes the wide variety of situations in which the privilege is claimed...

...He also finds that it is everywhere a corrupting influence, since it breeds the police shakedown and involves the buying off of telephone company employees...

...Meiklejohn's book is a philosophical inquiry, whereas Fiske's study and much of The Eavesdroppers embody primary empirical data...

...Political science departments and law schools have begun to offer survey courses and seminars on civil liberties law and problems...

...Some civil rights guarantees, such as the privilege against self-incrimination, are being explored in depth, and incisive writing on free speech questions is piling up rapidly...

...These books were written at various levels of discourse, from different points of view, and with a variety of methods...

...What turns up is an engrossing commentary on the state of mind of the contemporary librarian who must live with community pressures, and who generally, though not always, yields consciously or unconsciously to such pressures when buying controversial books...

...I have been reading his publications for years, and I have concluded that he is simply incapable of being dull...

...The author is assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and was one of the lawyers who argued the school segregation cases before the U.S...

...I think the traditional explanation which balances one interest against another is a better approach to the problem...

...Miss Fiske is concerned in her pioneering study, Book Selection and Censorship, with the effects of recent national moods upon librarians, so far as their selection of books is concerned...

...On the other hand, Mayers' book is a searching inquiry into a single constitutional privilege of a largely' technical character...

...Richard F. Schwartz, a development engineer who teaches in Philadelphia, contributes a section on how wiretapping is actually done...

...Miss Flexner's Century of Struggle is our first adequate, scholarly history of the woman's rights movement in the United States...

...Until recently legal scholars and political scientists usually treated the law of civil rights as a branch of general constitutional law, and much of it was overshadowed by the preoccupation with traditional issues relating to the nature of the federal union, particularly commerce and fiscal questions...

...To find her data she and her assistants interviewed about three hundred librarians in twenty-six selected communities in California...

...A final chapter on "private governments" does not quite jell...

...The key to the analysis is found in the fact that Britons view the colored man as a stranger to their customary way of life, "the archetypal stranger...

...He would be scrupulously careful to safeguard the right for run-of-the-mill defendants accused of crime...

...For example, we do not even have, as yet, an adequate history of the federal Bill of Rights...

...Lawyers and scholars will find this book useful, and the layman will find it instructive and readable...

...On the whole, the author is optimistic about the future, believing that "the legal tide opposing racial distinctions is clear and strong," and that "it shows no sign of receding...

...A product of enormous research, the book tells a rather full story in lively fashion...

...Perhaps most significant has been the development of a substantial literature on the problems of racial discrimination, stimulated, of course, by the great controversy over school desegregation...

...The State of Our Liberties by DAVID FELLMAN It is a rather paradoxical fact of history that while we Americans have always been deeply concerned with our civil liberties, especially in recurring periods of stress or crisis, the literature on the subject is not very impressive...

...It is hardly necessary to note that as decent men the authors agree with Justice Holmes' dictum that eavesdropping is a dirty business...

...His data are based upon on-the-spot interviews with all sorts of people ranging from police officials and public prosecutors to lawyers, judges, manufacturers of equipment, and convicts...

...His contribution, which covers well over three-fifths of the book, surveys actual practices, particularly wiretapping, in selected large cities...

...This is a well-written, well-researched, and fully annotated survey of American law in the major areas of race relations: public accommodations and services, interstate travel, elections, employment, education, housing, criminal law, domestic relations, and the armed forces...

...is "yes" and "no...

...At least two of them, those by Greenberg and Flex-ner, are major works of scholarship...

...The Eavesdroppers is also the best book yet to appear on its subject...

...But I should add that Meiklejohn has been one of the giants of civil liberties in our times, and he says in this book many wise things about intellectual freedom...

...His testimony before the Hennings Subcommittee in November, 1955, on the meaning of the First Amendment, here reprinted, is a gem...

...While Gellhorn focuses attention on the law as declared by the courts, he makes it perfectly clear that the major responsibility for retaining our freedoms rests primarily with the American people themselves...

...The answer to the question, "Shall we amend the Fifth Amendment...

...This one is for the election trade...

...Blanshard's book is largely polemical, but Ban ton's study of racial attitudes is rooted in first-rate sociological analysis...

...As for God and Man in Washington, Paul Blanshard is playing his same old record...

...But he would deny it to people occupying public offices or other positions of public or private trust when questioned regarding their trust...

...The lay reader who wants a general survey of the present legal content of civil rights will find Gellhorn's American Rights just what he has been looking for...

...Whether local law forbids or imposes controls on wiretapping, he found that the police everywhere resort to wiretapping, and defend it as a valuable tool...

...His introductory essay on the significance of vigilantism in American history is extremely well done...

...Lewis Mayers, a professor of law at the City College of New York, has written a competent, objective, non-sentimental survey of the Fifth Amendment guaranty against compulsory self-incrimination...

...Meiklejohn purports to believe that First Amendment freedom of speech is an absolute: "Congress shall make no law . . ." But since he is a sensible man, he also recognizes the propriety of laws forbidding libelous and slanderous speech or words inciting to crime...

...Some day the history of Negro rights will be written in much the same terms...

...In short, in this collection of books there is something for every taste...

...In this new book he surveys the law dealing with habeas corpus, fair criminal procedures, freedom both to speak and not to speak, legislative investigations, freedom of movement, and desegregation...

...The documentation is impressive and the materials assembled in the appendices are invaluable...

...I have always regarded this distinction as far-fetched, and I cannot believe that it adds much to the debate on the limits of free speech...

...Meiklejohn's book reprints his famous Walgreen lectures at the University of Chicago, first published in 1948, to which are added some miscellaneous papers written between 1948 and 1958 dealing with academic, intellectual, and other freedoms...

...The author, who is Betts Professor of Law at Columbia, combines impeccable scholarship with felicitous writing...

...Professor Caughey's book, Their Majesties the Mob, is a fascinating collection of documents dealing with the vigilante impulse in America from early frontier days to the time of McCarthy...