The Law as Friend

THE BAR

"There is a legal explosion!" With these words, courtly Orison Swett Marden, 60, newly elected president of the American Bar Association, summed up a dominant theme of the A.B.A.'s annual meeting held last week in Montreal. Such Supreme Court decisions as Gideon, Escobedo and Miranda have sharply expanded the U.S. right to counsel, requiring the services of many more lawyers and a deep change in the attitude of many A.B.A. members.

In Marden's view, it will all be to the good. Himself a senior partner in White & Case, a prestigious Wall Street firm, Marden has long been a leader of the legal-aid movement. The poor, he thinks, "are more apt to become good citizens, more apt to observe the law, and to regard the law as their friend rather than their enemy," once they discover that "the law protects them to the same extent that it protects the wealthiest person in the land."

Timely Defense. Not many years ago, such ideas would have been considered heretical by the conservative Southerners who then controlled the A.B.A. But last week the idea of "the law as friend" seemed instead to dominate the 5,250 A.B.A. members meeting at Montreal's slab-sided Queen Elizabeth Hotel. At first, not all members were quite prepared for change. The 275-member house of delegates very nearly denounced a key provision of the Johnson Administration's pending civil rights bill, which would desegregate Southern federal juries by ending the "key man" system of prominent citizens recommending veniremen. Instead, all U.S. federal jurors would be selected at random from voter-registration lists. In a dramatic appearance, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach delivered an impassioned defense of the bill and cried: "I can't live with the present system!" Impressed, the house of delegates decided to go along by a vote of 220 to 55.

A.B.A. committees will labor for months ahead on a variety of legal and national problems. Studies in the works include the 25th Amendment on presidential disability; Electoral College reform; modernization of the A.B.A.'s 60-year-old canons of ethics; and expanded legal services for all citizens in all walks of life. The A.B.A. also voted to admit law students to associate membership beginning with their freshman year.

The house of delegates further authorized a new A.B.A. Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, which Marden hailed as a means of encouraging public understanding that rights and duties go hand in hand. "It will seek to nurture a sense of responsibility on the part of lawyers in the recognition and enforcement of these rights and responsibilities," said Marden. "When legal rights are challenged or infringed, as Justice Jackson once observed, they are worth 'just what some lawyer makes them worth.' "

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