Cooling It

For the first time in its modern history, the 207,000-member American Bar Association last week had a genuine presidential election contest. Well, maybe not a contest, but at least there were two candidates.

A preordained choice agreed upon by a small group of A.B.A. leaders generally runs for the top spot--with about as much opposition as Leonid Brezhnev faces. This year the quasi-official nominee was William B. Spann Jr., 64, an Atlanta attorney who has been active in the A.B.A. for four decades. But Spann's relatively liberal inclinations distressed Houston Corporate Lawyer Leroy Jeffers, 66, a partner of John Connally, a former president of the Texas bar and, most important, a two-fisted conservative who believes the A.B.A. has plunged foolishly into broad national legal issues instead of sticking to one down-home essential: the problem of how lawyers practice law. So Jeffers became the first opposition candidate to get on the ballot, by petition of 100 A.B.A. members.

Torpid Crawl. That was as far as he got. At the A.B.A.'s 99th annual meeting in Atlanta last week, Spann won by a lopsided 260-to-59 vote in the governing House of Delegates.* But the Jeffers insurgency was a signal that recent efforts to move the A.B.A. onto a moderately activist course may have slowed to a torpid snail's crawl. Reported TIME Correspondent David Beckwith: "It was almost as if the bar was withdrawing from its leadership role in public discussion of today's issues." Delegates sidetracked a resolution opposing restrictions on abortion as not "germane." Despite a pending federal antitrust suit against the A.B.A.'s strict limits on lawyer advertising, conventioneers were in no mood to go beyond the modest liberalizing of ad rules five months ago (TIME, March 1). When Jimmy Carter appeared to talk about the need to reform the appointment of regulatory-agency officials, A.B.A. members were caught somewhat unprepared: the organization has yet to adopt broad proposals in that critical area. Indeed the at-least-temporary halt in activism threatens to leave the bar in the position of having judges and other officials decide on changes that affect the legal profession without much guidance from the lawyers themselves.

*President-elect Spann will take office next August. Chicago Corporate Lawyer Justin A. Stanley, 65, heads the A.B.A. this year and plans to push his pet project: getting more legal conflicts out of the courts and into arbitration, mediation and lawyerless small-complaint tribunals.

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