T |SHE KOREAN WAR began on June 25, 1950. Three months later, Congress passed the Defense Production Act, approved by the President on September 8, 1950. On December 16, 1950, the President declared the existence of a national emergency. A year later, negotiation of a new industry-wide collective bargaining contract between the major steel companies and the United Steelworkers of America reached an impasse, and a strike was called effective December 31, 1951. Acting under the Defense Production Act of 1950 (as amended), the President referred the dispute on December 22, 1951, to the Wage Stabilization Board, and the union voluntarily deferred the strike which had previously been set. Ninety-nine days later, consequent to the refusal of the steel companies to accept the recommendations of the Wage Stabilization Board, the union called a strike for April 9, 1952. A few hours before the strike deadline, the President issued his Executive Order 10340, directing the secretary of commerce to take possession of the steel industry. The union immediately called off the contemplated strike and full-scale production of steel continued without further interruption until April 29, 1952. On the following day, Judge David Pine of the federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled, in a suit brought by the steel companies to invalidate the seizure, that Executive Order 10340 was unconstitutional; and later that same day, April 30, the Court of Appeals voted in a five-four decision to stay the preliminary injunction ordered by the district court pending an attempt by both parties to have the Supreme Court review the case. That Court granted certiorari on May 3 and handed down its decision on June 2, 1952, affirming the lower court. The strike began immediately after the announcement of the Supreme Court's decision, and lasted almost two months. The Korean war also continued unabated; the elimination of steel production had obviously resulted in both a serious cut in defense and munitions production and widespread bottlenecks whose effect, in terms of the domestic economy, would be highly inflationary; the grave possibility of a full-scale war with the U.S.S.R. remained unchanged. This, in brief compass, is the outline of the circumstances surrounding the decision in what has been widely heralded as the greatest constitutional crisis of our generation. Any social conflict of these dimensions can obviously be dealt with from various points of view and many centers of interest. The limited