Law and Liberties

...He does an especially thorough job in recounting the great controversy over the Bank of the United States, which occurred when Taney was serving in the Jackson cabinet, first as Attorney General and then as Secretary of the Treasury, and in reviewing the Dred Scott case, which was by all odds the most famous litigation handled by the Taney Court...

...Justice Murphy was a decent man and his heart was in the right place, but he was not a great legal scholar nor even an exceptionally competent legal craftsman, as a rereading of his opinions will suggest...

...He believes that de facto segregation in the North is as bad as any other form of segregation, and that the courts will not be able to supply the needed remedies...

...That there is tension between the norms of legal justice which constitute the rule of law, on the one hand, and the professional interest of the police in administrative efficiency, on the other, is the central theme of a fine study in the sociology of law, Justice Without Trial, by Jerome H. Skolnick, who teaches sociology at the University of California in Berkeley...

...Undoubtedly, the policeman tends to resent the restraints imposed by appellate courts in the name of constitutional law as being unwarranted obstacles to efficient administration of the criminal law, but I demur to the author's further assertion that "the practical concerns of police do not enter the thinking of the judiciary on the problems of how policemen should act in carrying out their duties...

...His principal argument is that while the Supreme Court has been rendering acceptable decisions in this field of constitutional law, it has based them on faulty reasoning and bad history...

...Nevertheless Taney is worthy of our respect and admiration, and the general reader will enjoy this fine judicial biography...

...Bickel is a professor at the Yale Law School and a competent student of American constitutional law...

...No one will quarrel with his observation that while we are bound by the Court's legal pronouncements, we are not obliged to accept the Court's version of American history...

...Skolnick maintains that there is a basic conflict between the demands of the rule of law, and the police concern with order, efficiency, and initiative, and that this is the principal problem of the police in a democratic system...

...The basic remedy lies not so much in increased professionalism within the police force, but in changing the fundamental values of the general community...

...As chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hennings fought for fair codes of procedure for loyalty cases in the civil service, and against wiretapping and secrecy in government...

...As Kemper remarks, Hennings "firmly maintained that a democratic nation was not worth saving from Communism if in the process it lost the principles that made it democratic," since he believed "that democratic principles constituted the means rather than the price of victory over Communism...

...In Mr...

...He also took a leading part in the defeat of legislation which was designed to curb the powers or reduce the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court...

...There is a long essay on Murphy's views on the subject of constitutional liberty, but the analysis is uncritical and platitudinous...

...In his recent Frank L. Weil Institute lectures, The Garden and the Wilderness, Mark De Wolfe Howe, well-known professor of law at Harvard, calls attention to the theological foundations of the principle of separation...

...To deal with what the authors call "the dynamics of civil liberties," six major civil liberties problems were selected for extended treatment, and in addition to making the customary analyses of Supreme Court opinions, the authors look into political context, the role of organized interest groups, the impact of community attitudes and public opinion, and the struggle for compliance after the cases were decided...

...Some personal habits reduced his effectiveness, but he made a place for himself as a leading civil libertarian, at a time when such a position required both courage and hard work...

...As he remarks, "the rule of separation was no less a postulate of faith than it was an axiom of truth...

...This is what Roger Williams had in mind when he spoke of the separation "between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world...

...Lewis' book tells the story of this eminent lawyer and judge in a more popular manner...

...Other essays in this miscellany concern the political ambitions of former Chief Justices, the clerks of the Justices, the reapportionment question, and the issues involved in the controversy over the place of religion in the public schools...

...Among American public law concepts, few are now more hotly debated than that of the separation of church and state...

...On the other hand, the place in history of Roger Brooke Taney, who served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, is secure, and Walker Lewis, a Baltimore lawyer, has written a readable biography, Without ¦ Fear or Favor...

...In the tradition of Eighteenth Century rationalism, Thomas Jefferson argued for a "wall of separation" for the good of the state...

...Following three terms in the House of Representatives and a stint as public prosecutor in St...

...Finally, Skolnick makes the point that the policeman is more concerned with efficiency and with getting results than with observing the punctilios of the rule of law because the community demands and rewards the former, and doesn't care too much about the latter...

...Bickel believes that the period of "permissive tokenism" in the field of school desegregation is coming to an end, and that we have reached the time for "enforcement in earnest...

...Howe has presented an interesting and forceful argument in this learned and urbane little book...

...He accepts the morality of civil disobedience but believes that a policy of gradualism is best...

...It follows that most defendants have only those rights which the police are prepared to recognize...

...Louis, Hennings was elected to the Senate in 1950, and remained there until he died of cancer in 1960...

...Lewis consulted a wide variety of original and secondary sources...

...Ugly memories of the hysteria of the McCarthy decade are stirred up by Donald J. Kemper, now professor of church history at the Newman Center at the University of Missouri, in his Decade of Fear...

...That there is an interaction between politics and law is, of course, a well-known fact, and there is nothing particularly original about this basic point, as Bickel himself acknowledges in the preface...

...In respect to reapportionment and religion in the public schools he holds that the Court has been trying to decide too much...

...Similarly, he believes that the struggle over civil rights is a sort of revolution, and that courts are not equipped to deal with revolutions...

...His study is based upon empirical investigation of the operations of a police force in an unidentified city of middling size in California...

...Alexander Bickel's book, Politics and the Warren Court, is not, in fact, a systematic study of the politics of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, but a collection of essays published in learned journals and magazines of opinion during the past few years...

...Equally long and learned is the chapter which deals with the original understanding of the Congressional authors of the Fourteenth Amendment in regard to race questions...

...Bickel comes out on the side of political action, rather than litigation, as the way to get things done...

...A handsome, fluent, courteous, aristocratic, and intelligent man, Hennings was in the forefront of the struggle for civil liberties during what Kemper appropriately calls the decade of fear...

...From the nature of his job, says Skolnick, the policeman is conservative, both politically and emotionally, and conventional...

...Most of this book consists of a reprinting of Murphy's civil liberties opinions, together with a few of his speeches as Attorney General...

...The best essay is a long and well documented chapter describing the progress of school desegregation as reflected in lower Federal court decisions during the decade since the Brown case" was decided...

...On the contrary, I believe that capable judges have demonstrated keen insights into the actual problems of the police as they go about their work...

...What is often forgotten is that an even older argument for separation is that it is good for the church...

...It may be a bit too early to fix his place in history, but the subject demands a more tough-minded, critical analysis than Norris has supplied...

...Arguing that the two main factors in the policeman's life are danger and authority, he believes that the policeman tends to be highly suspicious of others, and accordingly is isolated, more or less, from the community...

...Though the book has the superabundance of documentation which is characteristic of doctoral dissertations, this scholarly study adds a fresh dimension to our understanding of the 1950s by focussing on one distinguished political figure of the decade, Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri...

...I think Norris vastly overrates his hero...

...Freedoms, Courts, Politics is the work of two talented young political science professors, Lucius J. Barker, of the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), and his brother Twiley, who teaches at the University of Illinois (Chicago...

...He is a learned man and writes well...

...Senator Hennings was one of McCarthy's most persistent critics, and one of the architects of the Senate's memorable censure resolution...

...Lewis leans towards hero-worship...

...a strong disposition to stereotype is an integral part of his world...

...Justice Murphy and the Bill of Rights, Harold Norris, who teaches constitutional and criminal law at the Detroit College of Law, reminds us of what Frank Murphy, who served on the Supreme Court from 1950 to 1959, stood for...

...Some twenty years ago Carl Brent Swisher of Johns Hopkins wrote a solid, scholarly biography of Taney...

...Many important aspects of landmark cases are illuminated in this interesting and informative book...

...While he discovered little that was not known previously, he has a fine eye for detail, and particularly for social history...