THE SUPREME COURT: Direction Disputed

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The Liberals. After last week's decisions the Christian Science Monitor headlined across three columns: SUPREME COURT PICKS ROAD OF LIBERALISM, and it seemed clearly apparent that the new court was following Earl Warren's signposts. This was the newest turn in as fast-moving a 20 years as the court has ever known—and some Washingtonians believed that it had taken the court farther leftward than at any time since Franklin Roosevelt's day. Roosevelt's most liberal court was built (from 1943 to 1946) around Justices Hugo Black, William Douglas, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge. Chief Justice Fred Vinson edged President Harry Truman's Supreme Court back onto conservative paths. Replacing Vinson (deceased). Earl Warren joined with Old Liberals Black and Douglas to walk hand in hand in the direction of liberalism, and the bloc has been strengthened by Eisenhower-appointed Democrat Brennan. Justices Tom Clark, John Marshall Harlan or Felix Frankfurter go along with the solid, four-member liberal bloc often enough to make it a majority. Truman-appointed Republican Harold Burton has been virtually isolated as the court's only case-to-case conservative.

The newest member of the Supreme Court, Republican Charles Evans Whittaker, has not yet been around long enough to become identified with any group. (The arguments in both the Du Pont and Jencks cases had started before Whittaker joined the court.) But it is in Whittaker that the Supreme Court may find its spokesman for legal realism as against Warren's legal idealism. Asked about his attitudes of legal interpretation, Whittaker set out a signpost of his own: "I read the law only for an understanding of its meaning, and apply and enforce it in accordance with my understanding of its meaning." This doctrine of legal realism points to the responsibility to carry out U.S. law as it is, not as it ought to be under the precepts of liberalism or conservatism or any other political philosophy.