Slug?

"The multiplication of administrative agencies is the outstanding characteristic of our time. . . . The controversies within the range of administrative action may be different and extremely important, and they may call for a particular type of experience and special methods of inquiry, but the spirit which should animate that action . . . must be the spirit of the just judge."

This expression of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes's alarm at the bulging group of quasi-judicial Federal agencies which take evidence, hand down decisions and generally fulfill functions formerly reserved to the courts insofar as they were performed at all was the most significant point in a speech he delivered before the American Law Institute last week. It was not, however the part of the Hughes speech which got the biggest headlines. This distinction was reserved for an apparently innocuous generalization: ". . . The prime necessity in making the judicial machinery work to the best advantage is the able and industrious judge, qualified by training, experience and temperament for his office."

What made Mr. Hughes's generalization noteworthy was a set of special circumstances which caused Washington gossips to surmise that it was actually a most uncharacteristic breach of judicial decorum. The circumstances:

Since joining the Court last year, Hugo LaFayette Black has been its most spectacular dissenter. In his total of 13 dissents he has entered nine solitary dissents to four for Justice McReynolds, one each for Justices Butler & Reed, none for the rest of his colleagues. Last March, The Nation hailed the liberal tone of Justice Black's dissenting opinions, particularly one in which he contradicted the Court's 50-year-old interpretation of the 14th Amendment as applying to corporations.* Last month, however, a Harper's article by Marquis Childs reviewed Hugo Black's first year on the Court from an entirely different point of view. According to Mr. Childs, several of the Black dissents were notable less for their liberalism than for technical incompetence, and furthermore, Mr. Black's legal training and experience had been revealed as painfully unequal to his job on the nation's highest tribunal. Mr. Childs wrote that Justice Black's opinions often had to be rephrased by his colleagues to conform to Supreme Court standards; that he had been unable to carry his share of the Court's routine work; and that his presence thus had been "an acute discomfort and embarrassment" to his colleagues. Lawyers, who alone would be able to perceive awkwardness or incompetence in the text or citations of a Supreme Court Justice's opinions, were inclined to agree with Mr. Childs.

Washington's first shock, at the nature of Mr. Childs's findings, was succeeded by its second, as to how he had made them. Court dignity as well as obvious conventions naturally prohibit members from gossiping about each other to the press. Nonetheless, Mr. Childs is such a good friend of Justice Harlan F. Stone that by last week he and Justice Stone's office both felt called upon to deny that Mr. Stone had been Mr. Childs's chief source of information. By this time Scripps Howard Columnist Raymond Clapper had written a column corroborating Mr. Childs's article and adding that Justice McReynolds had been amused by it. Reporter Herbert Little of the Washington News had noted that whatever his other colleagues felt, at least Justices Brandeis and Roberts were on the best of friendly terms with Justice Black. And, leaping on the back of Chief Justice Hughes's remarks to the Law Institute, the New York Daily News's enthusiastic Washington Correspondents John O'Donnell and Doris Fleeson broke all records for conclusion jumping on the subject: "Developments in the Capitol . . . suggested again that some of the lawgivers of the United States Supreme Court had hitched up their judicial robes and in dignified fashion were in the process of putting the slug on their colleague, Associate Justice Hugo L. Black. , . ."

* Gist of the 14th Amendment passed in 1868 to guarantee civil rights to Negroes was the clause providing that no State could "deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. . . ." Following an 1886 precedent, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the term "person" applied to corporations as well as individuals. Gist of Justice Black's dissent in last January's Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. v. Johnson case: "I do not believe the word 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations."

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