Security Secure

"Th' Supreme Court," said Mr. Dooley, "follows th' iliction returns." Rejecting that cynical observation, political observers have nonetheless awaited with keen interest the Court's first post-election decision on a piece of social legislation. This week it came. At issue was New York State's unemployment insurance law, by which employers are taxed to finance subsistence payments to jobless workers. For his complaining clients. Lawyer Frederick H. Wood of Manhattan had argued that, because the law put the whole burden on employers and made them share it equally regardless of their individual responsibility for unemployment, it violated the 14th Amendment. Against this legalistic structure, New York State counterposed the demands of social justice. On the Court's decision, it was generally believed, hung the fate not merely of the New York law but of the Federal Social Security Act's unemployment provisions, which it implemented (TIME, Nov. 23).

Of the Court's three liberals, Mr. Justice Stone was at home, ill of bacillary dysentery, when the case was argued last week. He was still absent this week when, with surprising dispatch, the Court handed down its decision, 4-10-4. In baseball a tie favors the runner; in the Supreme Court, it affirms the decision of the lower court from which the case has been appealed, and New York's Court of Appeals had held the unemployment insurance law to be constitutional. Because of the tie, no opinion was written, no announcement made of how individual Justices had voted. Wise-acres guessed that Chief Justice Hughes and Mr. Justice Roberts, who have sided with their liberal colleagues before, had done it again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.