The Supreme Court: The Center of the Storm

Oyezl Oyezl Oyez! All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting. God save the United States and this honorable court.

The summer vacation ended with the traditional cry of the marshal. And the very haste with which the court hustled through ceremony and got down to its closed-door business testified to its crowded calendar. The nine blackrobed justices spent just 24 minutes admitting 70 new attorneys to practice before them; then they retired to their spacious, book-lined conference room. There they devoted the rest of the week to deciding which of the appeals and petitions that had piled up during the summer merit consideration. By their choice of cases, the justices would determine the issues they will be ruling on in months ahead. “We are very quiet there,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said. “But it is the quiet of a storm center.”

When they gather to consider which cases to review—perhaps 30 or 35 out of a record submission of 613 this summer—the justices shake hands all around to symbolize their unity of purpose. They sit at the conference-room table with Chief Justice Earl Warren at the head and Hugo Black, most senior in length of service, at the other end. No one else is permitted in the room while the court is deliberating. If someone knocks at the door, it is opened by the junior justice, now Arthur Goldberg. The justices come to the conference prepared with a list of the cases to be taken up that day; they present their views in order of seniority, the Chief Justice speaking first. Voting is done in reverse order—Goldberg first, Warren last. An application for review is accepted whenever at least four justices vote to consider it—the court feels a majority is unnecessary for acceptance.

This week the court returns to public session to hear oral argument on cases that came before it during the last term. Most important questions involved:

∙ DISCRIMINATION. Does it violate the Federal Constitution when state or local police powers are used to enforce race discrimination in privately owned public accommodations? The court will consider five related cases of civil rights demonstrators arrested on trespass charges at a restaurant and an amusement park in Maryland, lunch counters in South Carolina and Florida. Since a ban on discrimination in public accommodations is part of President Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill, the court may sidestep the broad issue, overrule the trespass convictions on narrow grounds.

∙ OBSCENITY. When may governmental authorities censor or ban a book or movie without breaching the First Amendment? In two separate cases, involving bans on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the French movie The Lovers, the court may try to clear up the muddle created by past Supreme Court decisions on obscenity.

∙ THE FIFTH AMENDMENT. Does the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause (“nor shall any person … be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”) apply to state proceedings? The question comes up squarely in the case of William Malloy, a Connecticut convict who pleaded the Fifth Amendment when a state board questioned him about gambling in which he had been involved.

∙ LEGISLATIVE APPORTIONMENT. What criteria should federal courts apply to state apportionment systems? Last year’s historic Baker v. Carr decision, which brought state legislative apportionment within the jurisdiction of federal courts, laid down no guidelines. In six cases from four states, the court will have chances to clarify its 1962 opinion.