The Supreme Court: The Limits That Create Liberty & The Liberty That Creates Limits

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THE SUPREME COURT

We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm center.

—Mr. Justice Holmes

Race, religion, reapportionment—each year the storm that swirls around the Supreme Court of the United States gets fiercer. To some Americans, the nine black-robed Justices have struck blow after blow for national maturity.

To others, they seem bent on coddling criminals, abolishing God and undoing the U.S. political system. This week the Court begins its 175th year with even some of its best friends worried about its wide-ranging attack on social ills that are supposedly the business of Congress and state legislatures. Can the Court cure them by proscription—and survive the reaction?

The stormy Court-centered argument thunders in a different vocabulary these days. No longer are the Justices automatically split between liberals said to be bent on destroying big business and conservatives accused of old-fashioned economics. No longer is the Court derided as a collection of nine old men too fragmented in their opinions to be relied upon to set national standards. The present split is between those who believe in "judicial restraint"—men who feel that real power should reside with elected officials and that the Court may eventually destroy itself by assuming too much—and so-called "judicial activists"—those who insist that the far-ranging provisions of a great Constitution have never yet been fully applied to American life and that the Constitution would die if not continuously restudied in the light of modern life.

The activists now hold the upper hand. In a flood of decisions that run counter to state laws and local customs, the Court has in the past ten years:

> Overturned state-enforced racial segregation in public schools and other public facilities.

> Banned the official use of prayers and Bible reading in public schools.

> Forced state criminal courts and police to match the strict standards imposed on federal courts and agents by the Bill of Rights.

> Ordered all state legislatures to give equal representation to cities and suburbs by apportioning their voting districts strictly on the basis of population.

Plea for Understanding. "The Court is making decisions boom, boom, boom. Many of them are too absolute to fit a country of 190 million diverse people," frets a Yale professor. "Of all three branches of Government," says Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, "today's Supreme Court is the least faithful to the constitutional tradition of limited Government and to the principle of legitimacy in the exercise of power."

Similar blasts in his day moved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to cry for "education in the obvious"—public understanding of the authority, purpose and performance of the Supreme Court. Yet today few Americans can even name the men whom Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wryly called the "nine black beetles in the temple of Karnak." Even fewer realize that the present Supreme Court is inspired if not dominated by a man utterly devoted, after his fashion, to limiting the power of the Government whenever it impinges on the rights of individual citizens. Mr. Justice Hugo La Fayette Black is one of the most ardent advocates of individual