Conservative Activist

The best-known law professors these days seem to be activist and liberal, urging sweeping social and political reforms. At Yale, Alexander M. Bickel, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, is as much an activist as any of his colleagues. He considers himself a liberal Democrat, campaigned for Robert Kennedy and serves as a contributing editor of the New Republic. Yet Bickel is a notable exception to the liberal stereotype: he is most noted for his judicial conservatism.

In the pas,t year Bickel, 45, has shuttled regularly to Washington to testify on subjects ranging from electoral-college reform to presidential war powers.

Late last month Congressman Richardson Preyer of North Carolina appeared before a congressional committee to discuss his school-integration bill and was frank to admit that Professor Bickel had drafted it.

Warren Court Critic. During his 14 years on the Yale faculty, Bickel has exasperated colleagues who have praised the accomplishments of the Warren Court. A former law clerk to Justice Frankfurter, Bickel insists that an insulated Supreme Court ought not to attempt to instigate broad social reforms. Sweeping policymaking by the court, he contends, not only displaces the proper functions of legislatures but also seriously hampers the effectiveness of the court itself. In a book published this year, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress, he carried his philosophical argument to its most controversial conclusions. Bickel suggested that the Warren Court's reapportionment decisions were not only wrong in concept but ineffective in result.

When a recent Bickel article in the New Republic asserted that coercive governmental integration policies on a massive scale would not work and should be stopped, the professor's critics mounted an angry counterattack. "Oh, Professor Bickel's position is just dandy," said Civil Rights Attorney Marian Edelman. "Just let him explain it to all those black kids who remain in segregated schools." Lumping his colleague with John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew and Strom Thurmond, Yale's Professor Fred Rodell wrote that "The dominant domestic policy of this antediluvian league is to liquidate the work of the Warren Court for civil rights and civil liberties and replace it with resegregation and law and order." The slight, urbane professor was unruffled. "I would lose my way intellectually," he says, "if I started thinking about the political impact of my positions."

Intellectual jousting has been a way of life for Bickel ever since he came to the U.S. as a 14-year-old immigrant from Bucharest. His family lived in New York City, where young Bickel spent most of his spare hours in the public library. "The ethos in our family was not to make money but to conserve it," recalls Bickel, who said that an overdue library book brought his father's sternest reprimand. Bickel breezed through City College of New York as a Phi Beta Kappa student, then moved to the Harvard Law School, where he became a law review editor.

No Holds Barred. After graduation, Bickel eventually found his way to the chambers of Justice Felix Frankfurter, the man who most influenced his thinking. "Frankfurter believed in intellectual egalitarianism," says Bickel. "You could debate him only with no holds barred."

After a year with the State Department's now defunct Policy Planning Council, he returned to Harvard to work on the papers of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. At Yale since 1956, Bickel has become one of the law school's most provocative teachers and prolific authors on constitutional law. He has also been one of the university's most outspoken critics of student militancy. When he wrote a magazine article last fall, a copy taped to the wall of a law school corridor was soon decorated with unflattering graffiti by activist student commentators. Unfazed, Bickel condemned "student revolutionaries intent on destroying the universities. To believe they are participating in parlor discussions is foolish."

Many of Bickel's detractors claim that his broadside pronouncements are a blatant effort to promote himself for the Supreme Court. But Bickel denies it and even suggests that the next court appointee might have experience in high political office--which he obviously does not.

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