THE SUPREME COURT: The Temple Builder

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Earl Warren, 14th Chief Justice of the U.S., is fond of a warm little story about three workmen constructing a building. A bypasser asked what they were doing. Answered the first: "I am following my trade." Said the second: "I am making a living." But the third, rising to his full height, replied: "Sir, I am building a temple." The lesson is simple: to Earl Warren the law is a temple and the Supreme Court a builder. And by last week the blueprints were ready, the mortar was flying, and the marble blocks were moving toward a new look in U.S. legal architecture.

Among 95 separate decisions made by the Supreme Court last week, these gave the general idea:

¶ The court directed the acquittal of five California Communists and ordered a new trial for nine others, all convicted in 1952 under the antisubversive Smith Act.

¶ The court reversed the 1951 loyalty-risk firing of ex-Diplomat John Stewart Service, who can now return to good State Department standing (presumably with back pay).

¶ The court reversed the contempt-of-Congress conviction of Labor Organizer John Watkins, who had refused to answer Communists-I-have-known questions put to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, and in so doing, the Chief Justice, as voice of the court's majority, gave congressional investigators a narrowed field to work in—how much narrowed only future decisions will tell.

¶ The court cut into the field of state investigations of subversive activities by reversing the New Hampshire contempt conviction of Paul Sweezy, sometime lecturer at the state university.

Not since the Nine Old Men shot down Franklin Roosevelt's Blue Eagle in 1935 has the Supreme Court been the center of such general commotion in newspapers (see PRESS) and in the bar. The New York Times trotted out the kind of headlines usually reserved for war or disaster. Cried a Chicago lawyer: "This court is unanalytical; it's vicious, it's stupid, it's illiterate, it's subjective." Retorted a California judge: "The decisions are sound and timely. The trials of Communists here are comparable only to the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary. Neither should have taken place."

Meanwhile, Justice Department attorneys wearily totted up the damage of recent Supreme Court decisions: some reckoned that of 89 Communists convicted under the Smith Act, at least 40 will probably be able to get new trials—or outright acquittals from the Supreme Court. Furthermore, there is scant hope of convicting many of the 27 awaiting trial because of the double impact of the California Communist decisions and the Jencks decision (TIME, June 17) requiring the Government to allow defendants to see pertinent FBI files—or drop the case. If anyone doubted before, last week made it clear that the Supreme Court under Earl Warren was building a new wing to the temple of American law—even at the cost of razing an old wing, hard-built.