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- pe: ee A = { fir Too. K wees ‘ pee, . - Gandy......- — ce ee eg coe oe wee = yD 7 . ra ae a rr - _. tr “ vw The wheel has made a full tum sfhce the era when © “Holmes, Brandeis and Stone dissenting” was a common- place on decision Mondays in the Supreme Court. i pos ' Today Holmes is gone and Brandeis ts in retirement.. But many of the doctrines set forth in their minority. opinions have come to prevail, and now their younger colleague in nonconformity, Harlan Fiske Stone, is nomi- nated to be Chief Justice. . . Mr. Roosevelt has well served the interests of national unity by going over the heads of all the New Deal's legal galaxy to tap the broad shoulder of a Coolidge-named | : ublicay who owes him no personal or political fealty— bu whose devotion to real liberalism is writ large in the | _ . It was Justice Stone, indeed, who last year read a ‘tecture in liberalism to the five Roosevelt appointees on : the bench, These New Deal Judges had decreed, in an | opinion written by Justice Frankfurter, that a certain pair of school children must salute the , in violation of their. religion, or else forego their education. Justice. a dissenting, called the decision “a surrender of the consti- | tutional protection of the liberty of small minorities.” : In the troubled times that lie ahead it may be that f patriotic fervor will tend to boil over into a brutalizing |, rysteria of the 4917-18 sort or worse. If 80, we will have |" & restraining influence in the new Chief Justice. : So much for civil liberties. It was in another field, in the struggle of social and economic forces against a status quo defended by the court majority, that Justice Stone really laid about him with a prophetic bludgeon of dissent. When his colleagues knocked out the New York Minimum Wage law he accused them of interpreting, not the Constitution but their own “personal economic pre- dilections.”. When the first agricultural adjustment act was outlawed he called the decision “a tortured construc- tion of the Constitution.” Justice Stone does not have Cardozo’s gift for written | eloquence; he is too good a mixer to rival the austerity of Hughes; he lacks the color of 4 Holmes. But he 4s Jearned in the law, he is abreast of what goes on in the world and he ts profoundly conscious of the court’s once- forgotten duty to leave the legislating to Congress. DA :. ‘The President filled the two remaining vacancies on the court with two loyal lieutenants, Attorney Gefieral. Jackson and Senator Byrnes, They are able men, — ! ow er 2 eee ee _ te Pits. aoe ee, uo CLIPPIN wie VAP No. iV DATE JUN 13194 FORVARILD BY N.Y, DIVISION FP K KO vo