THE LAW: The Work of Justice

(See Cover) Green eyeshade under a crop of white hair, heavy shoulders bent over an ancient desk, the Harvard Law School's Dean Emeritus Roscoe Pound wrote slowly, pouring the wisdom of his 87 years into his speech for Law Day, U.S.A.: "The law is the highest inheritance the sovereign people has, for without the law there would be no sovereign people and no inheritance."

Three thousand miles away in San Francisco, Superior Court Judge Thomas Coakley looked thoughtfully at the ax-hewn pine timbers of the oldest courthouse in California, picked up a pencil and began to write: "In the days when this courthouse was built, the law was young and often painful on this frontier. We developed in 1854 what our pioneers recognized, as did their forebears in the East, that there must be a respect for the law."

"A Chance to Celebrate." In thousands of U.S. cities and towns, other men dedicated to the rule of law made plans for carrying their message this week into the nation's courtrooms, classrooms and club meetings. On a train bound for Manhattan, Veteran Washington Attorney John Lord O'Brian opened his briefcase, took out the notes he had dictated for his Law Day speech. In St. Louis, a Negro law student named John Alexander Madison and a Negro policeman named Dred Scott Madison studied their parts for the Law Day re-enactment of the historic trial of their great-grandfather, Dred Scott.* In Seattle, Attorney Ford Elvidge was "digging into books I haven't cracked in 40 years," looking up English legal history for his Law Day speech. In Charleston, S.C., Veteran Lawyer Robert M. Figg pondered the difference in meaning be tween Communism's May Day and the U.S.'s Law Day: "I take it this date of May 1 was not chosen naively. It gives us the chance to celebrate our own way of life, while some others who don't believe in law are celebrating their way." In Washington the President of the U.S. worked on the Law Day speech he would deliver to a nationwide television audience. And the Chief Justice and Attorney General of the U.S. made ready to travel to Philadelphia and Independence Hall. There, in liberty's shrine on the eve of Law Day, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General William Rogers would join in nationally televised cere monies with the man who conceived the idea of Law Day: Charles Sylvanus Rhyne, president of the American Bar Association, prime mover in the campaign to get the U.S. this week to reaffirm its faith in the forces of law for peace.

That crusade began for Charles Rhyne last summer when he was installed in the A.B.A.'s presidency at the 80th anniversary convention in London. On Runnymede's historic meadow, Rhyne dedicated the A.B.A.'s monument in commemoration of the sealing of Magna Carta. In Westminster Hall, Chief Justice Earl Warren and then Attorney General Herbert Brownell of the U.S., Lord Kilmuir, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, and the lawyers of two continents joined in a session that was, in itself, one of the great landmarks in the history of law (TIME, Aug. 5).

"Do What Is Right." Since London, Charles Rhyne has traveled far and fast.

His nine months as president of the A.B.A. have taken him more than 100,000 miles to make 180 speeches in 38 states.