Decisions

-- In the 24 year history of the Taft-Hartley Act, the Federal Government has sought 80 day cooling-off periods in 28 major labor disputes, pleading that "national health and safety" required an end to the strikes. The Government was never refused. During the current dock strike, the Attorney General contended that the failure of 200 Chicago longshoremen to load $75 million worth of corn and soybeans for export imperiled the national economy. Federal Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz found the Government's case for an injunction "far less reasoned" than required. "Some harm or threat of injury is regrettably a natural, indispensable element of any strike," he said in the first denial ever of a Taft-Hartley cooling-off injunction. "However, it is the very essence of the only weapon labor can aim at management. Corn and soybeans are not airplane parts or missile components, and grain elevators are not steel mills or railroads." On the Government's petition to a court of appeals, Marovitz's ruling was upheld.

In suburban Detroit, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Troppi, already the parents of seven, became apprehensive about the possibility of another pregnancy. Mrs. Troppi obtained a prescription for Norinyl, Syntex Laboratories' contraceptive pill, and her nervousness vanished. But her calm mood, she claimed, was the result of her druggist's mistake: he had given her Nardil, a tranquilizer, and Mrs. Troppi later gave birth to a son. If the Troppis can prove negligence, a Michigan court of appeals ruled, a lower court can then order the druggist to pay damages. In computing the amount, the appeals bench said, the value of the joys of parenthood may be subtracted from the costs of raising a child.

Dissatisfied with conditions and rules at Maryland's Patuxent Institution, a group of 13 inmates asked a Maryland circuit court to free them. They claimed that the inmates' constitutional rights, including free speech, due process and protection from cruel and unusual punishment, were being violated by prison routine. Judges Robert Watts and Ralph Miller saw no reason to turn any inmates loose, but they did order important reforms. A Patuxent prisoner threatened with solitary confinement must henceforth get a hearing before a "relatively impartial" panel. The solitary cells must have adequate light, ventilation and sanitary facilities, and stays in solitary must not exceed 15 days. The court also ruled that institution officials were failing to make an effort to rehabilitate some inmates. One of the prisoners' lawyers, Julian Tepper of the National Law Office in Washington, D.C., believes that the verdict establishes a convict's nascent right to rehabilitation that will become a precedent in other states. Patuxent officials plan to appeal the decision.

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