The Law: Briefs

> Though numerous hirsute plaintiffs have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justices had steadfastly refused to get enmeshed in long-hair disputes. But last week the court finally faced the matter and trimmed some individual rights—at least for policemen. Suffolk County police on Long Island had objected to regulations that banned beards, flared sideburns and hair that went over the collar. Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan agreed with the officers that the 14th Amendment’s “liberty” guarantee protected them since “an individual’s personal appearance may reflect, sustain and nourish his personality.” But William Rehnquist, writing for a six-Justice majority, said drily that where the state’s standard is not “so irrational that it may be branded arbitrary,” the individual’s rights must bend “to the overall need for discipline, esprit de corps and uniformity.” The nation’s police could reasonably have expected a more tolerant view from Rehnquist: his own sideburns and locks would not pass the Suffolk County standards.

> In another decision last week the Supreme Court wrote finis to the legal aftermath of the My Lai massacre by refusing to review the case of former Army Lieut. William Calley Jr. Galley’s 1971 court-martial conviction for the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians in 1968 had been thrown out by a federal district judge, then reinstated by a federal appeals court, whose decision now stands. Of 25 Army officers and enlisted men charged with My Lai-related offenses, only Calley was convicted (two generals were censured). His original life sentence was reduced by Army authorities to ten years; he was freed pending appeal after serving nearly a third of that term, and the Army has said it would parole him if his appeal failed.

— Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had four children, only one of whom, Robert, had any children. In turn, only one of those three children, Jessie, had a child, and that sole offspring, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, has only one child, Timothy, now seven, who is therefore Abe Lincoln’s only direct descendant. Or is he? The elder Beckwith is at present in court denying he is the boy’s father. In England such a hassle might well involve a title. In the U.S. the issue is a divorce—and perhaps a trust fund worth more than $ 1 million. Beckwith, 71, and his 27-year-old estranged wife Annemarie Hoffraarr Beckwith have been fighting over a divorce for three years, each alleging adultery.

Now the District of Columbia’s Court of Appeals has ruled that the boy, who lives in West Berlin with his mother, must undergo a blood test to help check Beckwith’s claim of non-fatherhood—which would prove her adultery. As it happens, the trust fund, which was established by Lincoln’s daughter-in-law (Beckwith’s grandmother), could eventually go to the boy even if he is not Beckwith’s. The reason is that in any subsequent case directly concerned with Timothy’s legitimacy, the law would still be heavily weighted toward finding that when a woman gives birth, her husband is the child’s father. Thus even if little Beckwith could no longer claim to be a Lincoln, he still might get the million dollars to soothe his disappointment.