THE LAW: The Ultimate Issue

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In Los Angeles last week, 12,000 delegates and wives at the 81st annual convention of the American Bar Association renewed a year-old resolve to devote their best efforts to the next and most important extension of legal justice: creating conditions for peace through developing the rule of law among nations. But, under the eye of Chief Justice Earl Warren and three other Supreme Court Justices (Charles E. Whittaker, William J. Brennan Jr. and Tom C. Clark), the necessarily long-range study of world law had to compete for urgent present attention with painful problems of the law of the land—specifically in the issue of school integration.

Pilot Project. "When the value of going to court instead of to war is understood," said outgoing A.B.A. President Charles S. Rhyne (TIME, May 5) in his last official talk, "the people of the world will demand and get a worldwide judicial system." Law Day, the U.S.'s answer to Russia's May 1 show of military might, gained firm precedent when the board of governors decided to observe it again next year. Thomas E. Dewey's Special Committee on International Law Planning frankly added up U.S. failures in world-law leadership, proposed a system of continent-sized courts that would adjudicate day-to-day issues between nations under a revitalized World Court.

In his first official act, new A.B.A. President Rosser Lynn Malone Jr., 47, a lawyer from Roswell, N. Mex. who helped clean up the Justice Department in President Truman's closing days in office, made it clear that he would carry on where Charles Rhyne left off. As a first step, Ross Malone set up a series of regional conferences as a "pilot project for a world conference of lawyers" dedicated to peace through law.

Plain Account. To skeptics who doubt that courts can ever control passions between nations, A.B.A. discussion of integration rulings was a lesson, for it demonstrated the faith of U.S. lawyers in law as the means of achieving racial justice in the face of awesome strain. In one of the plainest accounts yet of the precedents that, case by case, led the Supreme Court to overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896), Attorney General William P. Rogers calmly laid down the law, left no doubt that defiant acts against integration would again be handled firmly. "The ultimate issue," said he, "becomes the role of law itself in our society, whether the law of the land is supreme or whether it may be evaded and defied."