On the Reservation

"The program of world peace through law is one of the greatest objectives that has been undertaken by the American Bar Association in a great many years." argued New Mexico's Ross Malone, past president of the A.B.A., before the Association's House of Delegates meeting in tense session in Chicago last week. Malone, braving a few whistles and catcalls, was leading an impassioned counterattack against a guerrilla action led by Seattle's Frank Holman. also an A.B.A. past president (1948-49), to throw a roadblock into A.B.A.'s program to make world rule of law a reality.

The roadblock was an attempt by Holman and a pickup band of supporters to get the association to reverse itself on a 13-year-old stand. In 1947 the Bar Association went on record opposing the so-called Connally Reservation, pushed through the U.S. Senate in 1946 by Texas' Senator Tom Connally, which reserves to the U.S. the right to withhold any case from the jurisdiction of the World Court in Geneva by calling it a "domestic issue.'' Since domestic disputes are actually exempt from World Court action anyhow, the lawyers knew that the Connally Reservation would serve only to encourage other nations to enact the same kind of proviso, create a situation where disputants could keep any meaningful international cases away from the court simply by labeling them "domestic.'' Events proved them correct, and the structure of international law was seriously weakened.

Under Holman's attack, another former A.B.A. president, North Carolina's Charles Rhyne (TIME cover. May 5, 1958) began quietly to nip the assault. His strategy: pigeonhole the Holman resolution in Rhyne's own Committee on World Peace through Law. It worked. After Malone's speech and others, the question came to a vote, wound up with a ringing 127-68 defeat for Holman and an added push for repeal of the Connally Reservation.

Thus bolstered, the drive for repeal focused once again on Congress, where a resolution for repeal, sponsored by Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, is before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Christian Herter, Attorney General William Rogers and Vice President Nixon, all have gone on record favoring the repeal of the Connally Reservation. Arkansas' William Fulbright, committee chairman, is in favor too. But Democrat Fulbright hesitates to send the repealer to the Senate until he sees signs that he can muster the two-thirds vote necessary for repeal. His biggest problem, says he, is Republicans, and he has quietly passed the word to the Administration that he will not send the repealer to the Senate floor until he is assured that the Republican floor leader, Illinois' Everett Dirksen, will put up a fight to get Republican support. At week's end, Senator Dirksen was still silent on the subject.

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