JUDICIARY: Jackson's Term

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>Mayor Frank ("I am the Law") Hague of Jersey City contravened the Constitutional rights of C. I. O. & friends by his ordinances forbidding them to assemble, speak, pamphleteer last year.

> States (such as Kansas, Kentucky) wishing to ratify a Constitutional amendment (such as Child Labor) after once vetoing it may do so, any number of years after its original proposal (1924), unless Congress specifies otherwise. >The Secretary of Agriculture has power to fix prices for milk in interstate commerce on big milksheds such as New York City's and Boston's, even though small distributors say this tends to give big milkmen a monopoly.

> The U. S. may have a review of the decision empowering Federal District Judge Patrick T. Stone in central Wisconsin to dismiss indictments and grant new trials to companies and individuals indicted and convicted by the U. S. for fixing oil prices.

>The Ellis Parkers, Sr. & Jr., convicted of kidnapping Paul H. Wendel after trying to make him out the kidnapper of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., may have no review of their cases.

>-Lieut.-Commander John S. Farnsworth, U. S. N. (discharged), convicted of selling his country's secrets and imprisoned at Atlanta, may have no writ of habeas corpus.

> Four mail-fraudsters who appealed their conviction on the ground that Willis Van Devanter, assigned by Chief Justice Hughes under the judiciary retirement act of 1937, heard their case in New York District Court after he retired from the U. S. Supreme Court, were denied appeal.

With these seven decisions, handed down this week in Chief Justice Hughes's absence and with a great deal of learned concurring as well as dissenting, the U. S. Supreme Court this week ended its term. Of 1,007 cases filed, it had denied hearings to 676, disposed of 246, with 85 carried over to next term because of late filing. Its calendar was, as Mr. Chief Justice Hughes insists on having it at term's end, absolutely clear.

Lawyers like to say that the brilliance of John Marshall as Chief Justice reflected in no small part the brilliance of Lawyer Daniel Webster, who argued often before him. By such a token, the Supreme Court term was the term of Solicitor General Robert Houghwout Jackson. Working like a nailer, 14 hours a day, he argued 24 cases (in 14 groups)—a prodigious number compared to the ten or a dozen average of his busiest predecessors—and lost but two of them.

True it was that the Court he dealt with had a working New Deal majority of four (Black, Reed, Frankfurter, Douglas) to which, for an actual majority, it was necessary to swing only one of the middle-roaders (Hughes, Stone, Roberts) to down the two conservatives (McReynolds, Butler). And these four were as eager as Bob Jackson to New Dealize the law. Justice Frankfurter went so far as to exult, concurring in the O'Keefe tax case, about "an important shift in Constitutional doctrine . . . after a reconstruction in the membership of the Court." Highlights of the term: