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As we know, the Supreme Court of the USSR and the supreme courts of the union republics did not come into being simultaneously. The supreme courts of the union republics came first, followed by the USSR Supreme Court.

It would probably be too much to say that the religion clauses of the First Amendment "ain't nothing" until the United States Supreme Court "calls" them. Yet they are to a large extent a form to which the Court must supply the content, a skeleton on which the Court must put the flesh and blood. The Court has added most of the flesh and blood only since it decided in the 1940s that the free exercise of religion and the establishment of religion clauses apply to the states as well as to the federal government.1 American constitutional law on the relations be tween government and religion is largely a creature of the Court's fashioning in the last one-third of a century. The purpose of this paper is not to undertake a thorough review and analysis of the Court's jurisprudence on this subject, but only to summarize it briefly in order to assess its impact on religion in the United States. For reasons that will presently appear, some opinions of the Court other than those interpreting the religion clauses will be cited. The products of the Court's activity that appear to have the most significance for religion in America are the following. The Court has all but closed the door to substantial public aid to church-related schools at the elementary and secondary levels. At the same time it has insisted on the secularization of the

In 1910 the people of California elected Hiram Johnson governor on a Progressive platform, and the 1911 session of the legislature devoted itself to numerous reform measures. The direct primary, the initiative and the referendum all became law. The legislature also passed a bill providing for recall of public officials, including judges. A key part of the Progressive program was the formation of a new railroad commission. The Southern Pacific Railroad, vividly portrayed in Frank Norris's The Octopus, had dominated the old commission, which exercised jurisdiction only over transportation companies.1 The Progressives believed that all public utilities needed supervision by men dedicated to the public good. In pursuit of that goal, John W. Eshleman submitted three constitutional amendments and the Public Utilities Act to the legislature. The three constitutional amendments dealing with the railroad commission concerned sections 21, 22 and 23 of Article XII of the Constitution of California. The amendment to section 21 pertained to the regulation of railroads and had three major features. It restated an earlier prohibition against discrimination in charges or facilities. It prohibited railroads from charging more for a short haul than for a longer haul, and it allowed the railroad commission to compel a railroad to make reparations to a shipper who had been unfairly charged. The amendment to section 22 reorganized the railroad commission, creating a body of five members appointed by the governor and subject to recall by the legislature. In a very important provision, the amendment gave the legislature authority to grant the commission additional powers.2 The amendment to section 23 dealt with

THE annual number of applications for review (mainly petitions for certiorari) received by the U.S. Supreme Court has doubled since the late 1950's and has increased fourfold since the late 1930's (Table 1). The growth of the casehold has been quite steady since the Court's 1950 term (Figure 1). On the assumption that the Justices were probably not underemployed in the 1950's--or for that matter in the 1930's-it is natural to wonder whether the increase in the caseload may not have overburdened the Court. The widespread belief that it has is behind the many recent proposals for reducing the Court's caseload, the best known being the proposal of the Study Group on the Caseload of the Supreme Court, headed by Professor Paul Freund, to establish a new court to screen out unmeritorious applications for Supreme Court review and to resolve conflicts among the federal courts of appeals.' The Freund Report has touched off a lively debate, in which a central issue is the significance to be ascribed to caseload statistics such as those presented in Table 1. We believe that statistical data and analysis are highly relevant to the workload issue but that more data, and a more detailed analysis of data, than available in the Freund Report or elsewhere are required in order to study the workload problem competently. We present additional data, plus additional analysis of existing data, in this article. In particular, by using a readily available source of information about the subject matter of cases filed with the Court-United States Law Week-we have been able to

(1975). Last Tango in Paris, et al. V. the supreme court: The current state of obscenity law. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 279-289.

The problem of jurisdiction is of even greater importance in international law than it is in the domain of municipal law. This may easily be understood because, up to the present, no international tribunal has been furnished with obligatory jurisdiction binding upon all States. In consequence, the judicial settlement of many international disputes depends upon the preliminary question whether any tribunal has jurisdiction over the case. Although since the foundation of the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague a tribunal invested with a very comprehensive jurisdiction exists, it is, nevertheless, significant that in many cases before the Permanent Court a plea to the jurisdiction has been raised with the obvious intention of preventing a legal decision on the merits.

There were no changes in the personnel of the Court during the 1947 term. The former Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, Avho had retired from the Court on July 1, 1941, died on August 27, 1948. Justice Hughes had served on the Court from May 2, 1910, to June 10, 1916, and was appointed Chief Justice on February 13,1930, succeeding William Howard Taft. In characteristic fashion, the justices filed during the 1947 term a very large number of dissenting and concurring opinions liberally salted with spirited and often bitter judicial invective.

(1962). The Supreme Court Ruling on School Prayer. The Educational Forum: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 71-77.

In his State of the Union Message on January 9, 1959, President Eisenhower declared his purpose of intensifying efforts “to the end that the rule of law may replace the rule of force in the affairs of nations” and of making proposals for “a re-examination of our own relation to the International Court of Justice.”

The Supreme Court has become an instrument for the application of an inadequate secular religion-Liberal idealism-to the social problems confronting our society. That idealism expresses an ontological theory of the nature of reality as atomistic and therefore as inevitably disorderly, purposeless, and irrational. Liberalism by its nature drives us relentlessly toward social disintegration. Liberal ontology contradicts the historical experience of civilized man, which has been one of expanding the area of order, purpose, and rationality.' It also contradicts our national experience as understood under liberalism's own empirical theory of knowledge. The meaning of the American adventure and the role of the Supreme Court-our present situation and our future-can be understood only in terms of the conflict within liberalism, between its irrational ontology and its rational epistemology, and between its atomistic ontology and our older tradition of order.

It can be argued that with regard to the paramount problem of the twentieth century, the establishment of effective international institutions for the achievement of peace and justice, the development of perhaps the most far-reaching significance has occurred in the judicial field.

Federation in Central America. The organization of an international court in Central America was greatly facilitated by the fact that since their independence began the five Central American states have had a tradition of solidarity. This tradition has persisted in spite of frequent dissensions, and it has been expressed in numerous attempts at federation. Under the Spanish régime, the Vice-royalty of Guatemala included in its five provinces the territory of what is now the five states. It was this dependency which declared its independence in 1821. Two years later the Republic of the United States of Central America was formed, and it continued for some years. Later attempts at union were made in 1835, 1842, 1847, 1852, 1889, and 1895, all of them more or less abortive, as was the latest attempt in 1921. Unanimous agreement of the five states was always difficult to achieve; distances were great and communications difficult; and no pressing need made union imperative. Yet the attempts at federation were renewed from time to time, over a period of a century. They had the effect of encouraging cooperation in many fields, and led to the efforts in 1902, 1907 and 1921 to create a judicial agency for the handling of disputes between the five states.

I Persons against whom the jurisdiction cannot be enforcedThe first part of this note deals with the persons who claim immunity from the compulsory jurisdiction of Canadian courts.(1) The Foreign State, Sovereign or Head of Foreign State as a DefendantThe law relating to the immunity of foreign states and sovereigns or heads of foreign states from Canadian jurisdiction is to be found in the common law and has been stated and re-stated in leading cases such as The Parlement Belge, The Porto Alexandre, The Cristina, Dessaulles v. The Republic of Poland and Mehr v. The Republic of China et al. Lord Atkin reduced this law to two propositions:The first is that the courts of a country will not implead a foreign sovereign, that is, they will not by their process make him against his will a party to legal proceedings whether the proceedings involve process against his person or seek to recover from him specific property or damages.The second is that they will not by their process, whether the sovereign is a party to the proceedings or not, seize or detain property which is his or of which he is in possession or control.

A protective tariff is constitutional. While most of us—Democratic party platforms to the contrary notwithstanding—had suspected that this was true, the Supreme Court, curiously enough, never passed on the question until its decision in Hampton v. United States. In that case the plaintiffs attacked the validity of the Tariff Act of 1922 on two grounds. In the first place, the so-called flexible tariff provision embodied in Section 315 was alleged to authorize an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the President. That section provides, in substance, that when the President, upon investigation, finds that differences in the cost of production here and abroad of articles produced in this country are not equalized by the tariff duties fixed by the act, he shall thereupon fix such new rates as will equalize these differences. The Court had no difficulty in rejecting this contention under the authority of Field v. Clark, in which the reciprocity sections of the Tariff Act of 1890 were sustained. Chief Justice Taft, speaking for a unanimous Court, reviews the general theory of the separation of powers and the doctrine that legislative power may not be delegated. He emphasizes, however, that each department may properly call upon the others for assistance “so far as the action invoked shall not be an assumption of the constitutional field of action of another branch.” The scope and character of this assistance, furthermore, “must be fixed according to common sense and the inherent necessities of the governmental coördination.”

The United Nations Security Council in a resolution passed on August 9, 1960, reaffirmed that “the United Nations force in the Congo will not be a party to or in any way intervene in or be used to influence the outcome of any internal conflict. …” A Commonwealth state, Ceylon, was a cosponsor of this precedent-making resolution. A few weeks earlier the Government of Malaya had announced a boycott on South African goods in protest against South Africa’s racial policy, another dispute involving a domestic jurisdiction plea. Commonwealth members have been parties to approximately half of the disputes in League of Nations or United Nations history that are fairly classifiable as involving pleas of domestic jurisdiction. These recent actions of Ceylon and Malaya suggest that the newer members of the Commonwealth will be no less active in shaping the domestic jurisdiction concept than the older members have been.

During the 1943-44 term of the Supreme Court, public attention was attracted to that body on several occasions by verbal exchanges in decisions of the Court which seemed unusually sharp and personal. On January 3, 1944, Justices Black and Murphy admonished Justice Frankfurter that "for judges to rest their interpretation of statutes on nothing but their own conceptions of 'morals' and 'ethics' is, to say the least, dangerous business."' In another opinion on the same day, the same two judges referred to "what is patently a wholly gratuitous assertion as to constitutional law in the dissent of Mr. Justice Frankfurter."2 In the Magnolia Petroleum Co. case, Justice Jackson observed that the minority judges were apparently willing to enforce the full faith and credit clause "only if the outcome pleases... ."3 Justice Murphy told the Court on one occasion that it was "rewriting" a criminal statute,4 Justice Jackson called the decision bringing insurance under the Sherman Act a "reckless" one,5 and Justice Roberts several times waxed sarcastic about the disregarding or over-ruling of precedents. "This tendency," he said, "indicates an intolerance for what those who have composed this court in the past have conscientiously and deliberately concluded, and involves an assumption that knowledge and wisdom reside in us which was denied to our predecessors."6 It is not surprising that the newspapers translated these disagreements into personal terms and began to write about the "feud that was smoldering behind the Grecian columns of the white marble court building." There are many reasons for not taking such accounts too seriously. Thomas Reed Powell has wisely warned "laymen . .. not to draw too broad conclusions from any reportorial propensity to play up judicial disagreements as contests like those in war or sports."7 Disagreement is no new thing on the Court. The faultless phrasing of the Holmes dissents may have raised to a higher plane, but did not conceal, differences as sharp as any evident during the past term. While talk of feuds may be left to the gossip columns, it remains true that the disagreements among the justices during the past year deserve

As we know, the decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet of July 8, 1944, provided that divorce cases were to be heard by two courts: in a people's court, and then in the regional, territorial, area [okrug] or city court, or the supreme court of a union or autonomous republic, superior to the people's court. In accordance with Article 25 of the given decree, the responsibility of the people's court included establishing the motivations for the petition for divorce and taking measures to reconcile the spouses. If reconciliation of the spouses did not occur, the procedure in the people's court was deemed complete, and the plaintiff had the right to petition the higher court to dissolve the marriage. By virtue of Article 26 of the decree of July 8, 1944, the resolution of such a case on its merits was within the jurisdiction of the higher court, and it alone could issue a decision dissolving a marriage. When it recognized the need to dissolve a marriage, this same court had to determine which of th...

The Supreme Court of the United States has been as impartial an umpire in national-state disputes as one of the members of two contending teams could be expected to be. This is not to impugn the wisdom or the fairness of the Supreme Court, but it is to say that the Supreme Court has been partial to the national government during the past one hundred and forty-four years of our experience with a federal system in the United States. The states, as members of the federal system, have had to play against the umpire as well as against the national government itself. The combination has long been too much for them.

The reinforcement of legality and public order by every possible means, and the fuller protection of the rights of Soviet citizens are inviolable conditions for the successful building of a communist society in our country. In connection therewith, there is a marked increase in the demands made upon the judicial agencies, whose work must be performed with exact and undeviating execution of the laws.

QUR anti-trust legislation and the court decisions based thereon have been accused of thwarting economic development. At the same time, economic forces have had a profound effect on the law and its judicial interpretation. The relation between law and economics is reciprocal. Economic doctrines can be read into the Supreme Court decisions, but it would be precarious to claim that the Court has followed any theories consistently. Though it has certain predilections for logic, precedent and consistency, the Supreme Court is essentially pragmatic, making our government, after all, one of men rather than laws. Recently the Federal Supreme Court has well-nigh nullified the Sherman AntiTrust Law recognizing the efficiency of combines and even monopolies. The period before the Industrial Revolution has been described as one of undersupply and starvation, the nineteenth century as a period of oversupply and uncoiordinated production, while in the twentieth century the limited markets and excess productive capacity are becoming pressing problems. Attempts are being made to coordinate supply and demand, to eliminate the ruthless competition between businesses, in short, to stabilize.' Congress has recognized this trend by the exemptions from the anti-trust laws which it has given in whole or in part to banks, railroads, farmers, horticulture, foreign trade associations, and so forth. In fields not touched by this legislation the Supreme Court has by a process of inclusion and exclusion changed the original rigid interpretation of the Sherman Law so that today mergers, combines and perhaps even monopolies are permitted and welcomed. This reversal is due to the Court's knowledge and understanding of the efficiency in production and distribution of large scale organizations as well as their stabilizing effects. In the early history of the Sherman Law the Supreme Court was given to the laissez faire doctrine which, driven to its logical conclusion, assumed that the smaller the business units the more satisfactory the social result. Any combination, by eliminating some competition, was outside the public interest. This extreme individualism of the Court is partially explainable by the wording of the Sherman Law, namely, that every contract and combination in restraint of trade

The membership of the Supreme Court did not change during the 1944 term, but Mr. Justice Roberts resigned in July after the term had ended. Divisions in the Court were as numerous and as difficult to classify as before. Four justices dissented in twenty-seven cases, while three justices dissented in sixteen cases. The Court seems to be moving toward the old practice of the pre-Marshall period by which the justices wrote seriatim opinions. There is a depressing increase in the number of cases in which three, four, and even five justices feel impelled to write separate opinions.

The membership of the Supreme Court underwent but one change during the 1940 term. Mr. Justice McReynolds retired on February 1, 1941. Chief Justice Hughes retired on June 2, 1941, after the term had closed. The vacancies thus created were both filled during the summer recess. Mr. Justice McReynolds, a Tennessee Democrat, was Attorney-General in President Wilson's first cabinet, and was appointed to the Court in 1914. He has long been rated one of the most conservative of the justices and was a consistent and bitter opponent of the New Deal and all its works. Mr. Justice Van Devanter, who had retired in 1937, died on February 8, 1941.

It has been remarked that the Government of the United States “seldom loses an opportunity to profess its loyalty to international arbitration in the abstract. … The expression of this sentiment has become so conventional that a popular impression prevails that it accords with the actual policy of the United States.” This ambivalent attitude is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in a memorandum addressed by Mr. John Foster Dulles on July 10, 1946, to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “The United States, since its formation,” Mr. Dulles states, “has led in promoting a reign of law and justice as between nations. In order to continue that leadership, we should now accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. If the United States, which has the material power to impose its will widely in the world, agrees instead to submit to the impartial adjudication of its legal controversies, that will inaugurate a new and profoundly significant international advance.” Although the initial step of accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court would in itself be “of profound moral significance,” it would, Mr. Dulles continues, “assume greatly increased practical significance” only when “limiting factors” have been removed, for the “path is as yet so untried that it would be reckless to proceed precipitately,” the Court “has yet to win the confidence of the world community,” and “international law has not yet developed the scope and definiteness necessary to permit international disputes generally to be resolved by judicial rather than political tests.”

No one who has followed the steady expansion of federal authority over the business of interstate carriers sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the Shreveport Case, Illinois Central R. Co. v. Public Utilities Commission, and Railroad Commission v. Chicago, B. & Q. R. Co., will view with surprise the unanimous decision of that tribunal in Dayton-Goose Creek R. Co. v. United States, sustaining the validity of the “recapture” clause of the Transportation Act of 1920. This clause provided in substance that since it is impossible to establish uniform rates upon competitive traffic which will adequately sustain all the carriers needed to do the business, without giving some of them a net income in excess of a fair return, any carrier receiving such excess shall place one-half of it in a reserve fund to be maintained by the carrier for certain specified purposes, and shall pay the other half into a general railroad revolving fund to be maintained in the interstate commerce commission. This fund is to be used by the commission to make loans to carriers to meet expenditures for capital account, and so forth.

“Pocket veto” is the term applied to the killing of a bill by the President by the process of retaining it without signing it when Congress adjourns before the bill has been in his hands ten days. The Constitution provides for the pocket veto by stating: “If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law.” In the “Pocket Veto” case the Court decided that the word “adjournment” in this clause refers not merely to the final adjournment at the expiration of a Congress, but to any temporary or ad interim adjournment. In short, the President may effectively pocket veto a bill whenever Congress, by going home, prevents him from returning it within ten days. The Court thus gave judicial sanction to a practice which has been followed sporadically ever since the days of Madison.On June 24, 1926, a bill was presented to President Coolidge authorizing certain Indian tribes to sue in the Court of Claims. On July 3 the first session of the 69th Congress adjourned, and it did not meet again until December. It was not in session on July 6—the tenth day after the bill was presented to the President (Sundays excepted).

In November, 1930, Judge William Clark of the United States district court in New Jersey achieved nation-wide notoriety by a decision holding that the Eighteenth Amendment was not properly ratified and is therefore not a part of the Constitution. A prosecution had been brought against one Sprague, under an indictment charging unlawful transportation and possession of liquor in violation of the Volstead Act. This indictment Judge Clark quashed on the ground that the Eighteenth Amendment upon which the Volstead Act rests should have been ratified by conventions called for that purpose in three-fourths of the states, rather than by the legislatures of those states. This conclusion he supported by a long argument emphasizing the fundamental character of the constitutional change effected and the importance and necessity of having such a change accomplished by the agency of representatives elected by the people of the several states for that specific purpose. An appeal from Judge Clark's decision was at once taken by the government under the provisions of the Criminal Appeals Act of 1907. In fact, it was to meet just such situations as this that the act of 1907 was passed; for without the possibility of such appeal a decision of a lower federal court adverse to the constitutionality of a federal criminal statute might be final within the district concerned. No question of double jeopardy is raised by this procedure, since the accused is not placed in jeopardy until the trial jury is sworn and the quashing of the indictment occurs long before that point is reached.

The dispute between Britain and Iran relating to the nationalization and seizure of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company concessions and refinery plants by the government of Premier Mossadegh aroused unusual interest when brought before the International Court of Justice by Britain in 1951. The Iranian Oil Nationalization Act, coming after long and bitter negotiations between the oil company and the Iranian Government over oil royalties and operational arrangements, carried with it important political and strategic considerations.

OF course, it is obvious that at present our government and we as a people do not have any legal relation whatever to the World Court, but it is also equally clear that both as a government and as a people, we, even now, sustain a very intimate, important-it may be fateful-moral relation to that Court. It has seemed to me that this relation is so distinctly moral, as distinguished from legal, that it would have been wiser, perhaps, for the Committee on Program to have selected a doctor of divinity member of the Academy to speak on the assigned subject, rather than a lawyer. Let us consider together the origin of this moral relation and how important it promises to become to us as a nation. No government in the world has urged upon the other nations the pacific settlement of international disputes, as a national policy, with the persistence and seeming sincerity of conviction with which our government has urged it from the very beginning of our national existence. In Jay's Treaty, our earliest important international treaty, provision was made for settling three very vital subjects of difference with Great Britain by arbitration. In April, 1923, Secretary Hughes, in an address to the American Society of International Law, said that our government had been a party to more than seventy international arbitrations, and in recent years we have concluded more than a score of general arbitration conventions. When it is recalled that during the whole of the 19th century there were only about one hundred and thirty-six important international arbitrations, it is plain that it is not too much to say that, notwithstanding our several wars, our government, for more than a century and a quarter, has been the most conspicuous advocate of the pacific settlement of international disputes in all the world. However, it was arbitration in some form and not a Permanent International Court of Justice that was advocated by our government and statesmen prior to the beginning of the present century. It may, I think, be safely said that prior to the first Hague Convention in 1899 no serious proposal had been made by responsible statesmen looking to the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice. This for the re son that such a court was regarded as too great an advance upon anything theretofore achieved to be thought of as within the range of practicability.