The Supreme Court: A Big Week for Oral Arguments

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For four hours a day, four days a week, two weeks a month, the Supreme Court listens to lawyers argue their cases. For the lawyers, their rigorously controlled time before the bench can be a harrowing ordeal. They are allowed exactly one hour* by the clock in which to make their oral arguments—and during that brief span they must field the penetrating questions of the nine justices. "I made three arguments in every case," the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once wrote about his own appearance before the court as Solicitor General of the U.S. "First came the one that I had planned—logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one I actually presented—interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night."

When he himself was appointed to the court, Justice Jackson learned that his colleagues had mixed views of oral argument. Some thought it vital, others thought it largely a waste of time. Over the years, written briefs have become less and less brief; the justices have the opportunity—whether they use it or not —of reading a lawyer's whole story before he utters a word in court.

Whether the verbal sparring wins, loses or makes little impression, seldom does the court hear oral argument on so many big and brambly constitutional issues in one four-day session as it did last week.

Forms of Evasion. The procession began with a platoon of civil rights lawyers backed up by the Justice Department, arguing that Prince Edward County, Va., should not be permitted to evade court-ordered desegregation by abolishing its public school system. After the Supreme Court's landmark segregation decision a decade ago, Prince Edward closed its public schools in 1959 and set up "private" schools for white children. Negroes had no schools at all from 1959 until last year. "We have a truly local-option law in Virginia," argued an assistant attorney from Virginia. As a friend of the court, Solicitor General Archibald Cox demurred. The Prince Edward dodging of the issue, he said, "constitutes invidious discrimination under the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment."

Next, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund attacked the Atlanta school-integration program as another form of evasion. Atlanta's grade-a-year plan, is not really desegregation, said Lawyer Constance Baker Motley. The pace is too slow, she contended, to qualify as the "deliberate speed" that the Supreme Court called for in 1955. The pace is indeed slow, admitted a lawyer for the Atlanta school board, but the city's attitude, he maintained, "has been compliance, not defiance."