Supreme Court Behavior and Civil Rights

Abstract

T HE HIGHLIGHT of the 1956 term of the United States Supreme Court was the expanded protection given civil liberties. Court holdings considerably weakened the restrictive provisions of the Smith Act,' opened FBI files defendants in certain cases,2 and established safeguards around the exercise of congressional investigatory powers., The term was also notable for the fact that voting statistics identified the operation of a new libertarian4 bloc of Douglas, Black, Warren, and Brennan. While the 1957 term continued the same general patterns, analysis reveals several highly suggestive deviations. The purpose of this paper is explore the patterns of judicial behavior in civil liberties cases decided by the Court in the 1957 term. A focus on this particular area of decision-making is justified by the heavy emphasis in American Public Law on civil liberties problems. Selection of such a focus is buttressed further by the suspicion abroad that attitude on the part of the Court has had too much and the law too little do with deciding such cases in recent years. One should recognize, of course, that diagnosis of the motives underlying positions taken by Supreme Court justices is fraught with peril. But one cannot ignore phenomena which appear from the record. Nor should one close one's ears confessions of garrulous judges that it is now popular on the Court to regard every so-called civil liberties question as constitutionally self-answering. 5 The identification of civil liberties cases presents some difficulty. But since this discussion is not explore semantical problems a simple definition is adopted. In this paper a civil liberties case is one involving a claimed right of the type covered by the Bill of Rights and Civil War Amendments the Constitution. On this definition it makes no difference whether the claim calls for con-