THE SUPREME COURT: Roundhouse Punch

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"The most unspectacular and yet the most sensational news-happening of our times," fumed syndicated Columnist David Lawrence last week, "is the manner in which the forty-eight state governments are being deprived of their rights by the Supreme Court of the United States." Lawrence, along with states' righters already hot under the collar about court rulings that have struck down segregation and state antisedition laws (TIME, April 16), was angered by the court's latest decision: that railroad unions can en force union-shop agreements even in states where the union shop is forbidden by "right-to-work" laws.

The case at hand involved five Nebraska employees of the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1953 the five employees, all office workers, had flatly refused union membership, contending that such action would be a violation-of the right-to-work provision in a 1946 amendment to the state constitution. The Nebraska Supreme Court backed them up. The Railway Clerks and other unions affected carried the appeal to Washington, and the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Nebraska decision on the grounds that a Railway Labor Act amendment specifically permits companies and unions to negotiate union-shop agreements even if there is a state law to the contrary. Under the U.S. Constitution, said Justice William Douglas for the majority, federal law is supreme.

The court carefully noted that it was. not invalidating the right-to-work laws that are on the books in 18 states. Where Congress chooses to recognize them, as in the Taft-Hartley Act, they are still effective. But the decision made it clear that today's Supreme Court unanimously agrees that compulsory membership in a union shop does not violate any basic constitutional freedoms.