The Supreme Court: U.S. Fever Chart

In a rare move, the U.S. Government last week invoked its constitutional power to bring a suit “originally” in the Supreme Court—leaping over all lower court action. It was the first such case in 16 years—and only the 15th in U.S. history.

As in all such cases, the stakes are high: the constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Government is suing Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, where federal examiners have been stopped cold in their effort to get Negroes registered. In those states, says the Government, local courts have simply kept Negroes off the voting rolls on the ground that the new federal law is an unconstitutional infringement on state power to regulate-elections. To end this “grave frustration,” the Government seeks a swift Supreme Court decision— hopefully before the South’s coming spring primaries. Before that happens, the court must accept the case.

As it opens its 176th term, the court also confronts a docket of 1,300 other cases—a fever chart of almost every crucial conflict in the U.S. Among the highlights:

• ANTITRUST. To what extent can manufacturers restrict franchise retailers? Chevrolet dealers in Los Angeles sold new cars at bargain rates through dis count houses. By stopping them, argues the Government, General Motors restrained trade and violated the Sherman Act. The trustbusters insist that such franchise agreements hobble merchants across the country.

• CIVIL RIGHTS. Since murder is a state crime, what can the Government do when Southern states fail to act in racial murders? Last year it tried to resurrect an 1870 law that makes it a ten-year rap to deprive any person of his federal rights, but two Southern federal judges refused to apply the law in Georgia and Mississippi. The Supreme Court has also agreed to review the new Southern gimmick of giving Negroes “free choice” to attend white schools, while allegedly pressuring them not to. The court has refused for the fourth time to take a case involving Northern de facto school segregation—in effect, leaving Northern school administrators to remedy unintentional segregation.

• PORNOGRAPHY. Is Fanny Hill obscene? No, said New York’s highest state court. Yes, said comparable courts in Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts. All of them used the Supreme Court’s clearly unclear guidelines, such as whether pornography has “redeeming social interest.” Now the learned Justices must curl up with Fanny Hill and subjectively decide for themselves—a chore that the American Civil Liberties Union urges them to give up entirely by declaring that all published material is protected by the First Amendment unless it creates a “clear and present danger” of antisocial conduct. The A.C.L.U. makes its point in the case of Publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who got a five-year rap for circulating the now defunct magazines Eros and Liaison and a so-called psychological study titled The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity. While Eros gets high marks from assorted literary eminences, the court is unlikely to be edified by Ginzburg’s gamier products, which he mailed from Middlesex, N.J., having failed to get postal privileges at Intercourse, Pa.

• REAPPORTIONMENT. What did the court really mean in 1962 by decreeing “one man, one vote”? This month the court 1) affirmed a temporary New York apportionment plan for election of the 1966 legislature, even though it violates the state constitution; 2) dismissed an appeal involving New York’s Suffolk County board of supervisors, putting off the question of reapportioning city and county boards; 3) agreed to review three Hawaiian appeals questioning whether apportionment can be based on the number of registered voters.

• VAGRANCY LAWS. Are they constitutional? The court’s long-awaited answer may come in the case of Eddie J. Hicks, a wandering guitarist who was convicted in Washington, D.C., of being a vagrant “leading an immoral or profligate life.” That phrase is so unconstitutionally vague, argues Hicks, that it permits police to lock up anyone who looks suspicious. The court is likely to pay close heed.