"Of the Greatest Importance"

A President signs many proclamations, Lyndon Johnson last week told his White House guests. Some of them are "of great significance." Others, he continued in a monument to restraint, are of "somewhat lesser significance and import." The President just wanted to make clear that he thought that the proclamation he was about to sign--designating next Sept. 13 as World Law Day--Was in the great-significance category. The proclamation, said he, "expresses something of the greatest importance about the purposes of the American people and the purposes of the American nation. And that is our commitment to, and our quest toward, a world where all men may live in peace with the hope of justice under the rule of law."

The audience that had gathered to hear these words was appropriate: Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg; two past presidents of the American Bar Association, Charles Rhyne and Robert Storey; the current Bar Association president, Lewis Powell, and the president-elect, Edward Kuhn; William S. Thompson, secretary-general of the World Peace Through Law Center; and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

This century of war, Johnson said, also "has really seen the beginning of a will and an effort to establish respect for the rule of law over the conduct of the nations of the world. Those nations must not perish under the heel or by the hand of those who refuse to honor their own agreements, or refuse to keep their own treaties, or refuse to respect the borders or the rights of their own neighbors. And this is central to the purposes of the American people."

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