The judgment delivered on September 30, 1946, by the International Military Tribunal brought to a close the first prosecution instituted under the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, entered into by the governments of the United States, France, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. But the publication of the judgment stirred a new wave of sharp criticism of the moral and legal foundations of the Nuremberg Trial. The charge that the Tribunal itself, as well as the substantive law which it applied, was ex post facto was renewed with vigor. So was the charge that no real justice was done at Nuremberg, because vanquished war criminals only were brought before the Tribunal and no attempt was made to try alleged war criminals of the victorious nations.

It is stressing the obvious to observe that the state must often resolve conflicts between certain of its constitutional powers and certain equally constitutional private rights. Such is the age-old controversy of liberty versus authority, familiar to every social scientist. Such is the contemporary controversy between “Bible-dizzy but patently sincere” zealots of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, more widely known as Jehovah's Witnesses, on the one hand, and the police power on the other. There is nothing novel about a quarrel between religion and the police power, as witness the Mormons; but a new twist is now given by the personalities of Jehovah's Witnesses and their unique ways of practicing their faith.

Much of their attitude is reflected in their slogans, “Religion is a Racket,” “Religion is a Snare,” and “Millions Now Living Will Never Die.” With a fine neutrality, they consign to the leaping flames all existing religious beliefs other than their own, although they are especially antagonistic to Roman Catholicism. Followers of “Pastor” Charles Taze Russell and “Judge” Joseph Frederick Rutherford, they are serene in their belief that the second coming of Christ is due momentarily, that there is no time to build churches, and that the “witness work” must be carried on by the direct method of calling on people in their homes, distributing pamphlets and playing records on portable phonographs describing their publications and beliefs for the edification of whomsoever will listen.

Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone died on April 22. He was appointed Associate Justice by President Coolidge in 1925, and was elevated to the Chief Justiceship by President Roosevelt upon the retirement of Chief Justice Hughes in 1941. On June 7, President Truman nominated Fred M. Vinson, then Secretary of the Treasury, to be Chief Justice of the United States, and the Senate confirmed the nomination on June 20. Mr. Justice James C. McReynolds, who retired from the Court in 1941, died on August 24, 1945. Mr. Justice Jackson, who in May, 1945, had been appointed chief American prosecutor at the trial of Axis war criminals at Nuremberg, did not return to the Court during the 1945 term. On June 10, Mr. Justice Jackson, in Nuremberg, released to the press a statement sharply criticizing Mr. Justice Black for his failure to disqualify himself in Jewell Ridge Coal Corp. v. Local No. 6167, U.M.W. This case, which awarded coal miners “portal-to-portal” pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act, was decided by a five-to-four vote, and Mr. Justice Black's former law partner was attorney for the union. The statement, unprecedented in judicial history, made public record of a personal antagonism between the two justices, and elicited nation-wide press comment. Mr. Justice Black made no reply, and there have been no later repercussions of the incident.

A court of eight justices decided twenty-three cases in which three justices dissented, and twenty-one cases in which two dissented. The Court overruled one earlier decision. This brings the list of overruled cases since 1937 to twenty-seven.

The President's signature of the new Administrative Procedure Act completed the second or legislative phase of the reform of administrative procedure which began with the introduction and passage of the ill-fated Walter-Logan bill in 1939–40. The investigatory phase which preceded it had its beginning in the reluctant recognition accorded administrative law as a separate discipline at about the turn of the century. The refusal to recognize the existence of administrative law gave way before a volume of literature on the subject, and became transformed into a criticism of the administrative process itself. The movement for reform of which the act of 1946 was the culmination has come largely in answer to these criticisms. Ignoring differences in phraseology and attacks on specific agencies, most critics appear to agree on the following arguments:

(1) The administrative process is essentially dangerous in that it ignores the traditional American theory of the separation of powers, a principal protection against tyranny and dictatorship in the United States. This argument may appear in several forms. Sometimes it is said that administrative law is to be deplored because it is typical of alien countries which are not as advanced politically as we. In the hands of the American Bar Association, this argument is used to point up dangers inherent in any system that has a tendency to limit judicial review. And sometimes the allegation is merely that the administrative process is a violation of the separation theory, leaving the evils of such a violation to implication.

Declining prestige of legislative bodies has recently prompted inquiries looking to self-appraisal and reform in Congress and in legislatures of a number of the states. Dissatisfaction with the traditional organization and procedure of state legislatures has grown among legislators, who undertake the perplexities of present-day law-making with inadequate assistance and ineffective machinery. Legislation was seldom a simple problem, but it is today more difficult than at any time in our national history. As the responsibilities thrust upon legislatures are increased, so must the tools and processes of legislation be improved if the quality of legislation is to meet the needs which call it forth.

To assist in the reappraisal and review of state legislative organization and procedure, twelve general suggestions for strengthening state legislatures have been reported to the Council of State Governments by a committee of state officials. Appointed in November, 1945, by the Board of Managers of the Council, the Committee on Legislative Processes and Procedures developed its report after broadly surveying legislative theory and practice and selecting for recommendation to the states those measures of most general application. Dealing with the problems of state legislatures generally, the committee decided at an early date to direct its attention to the strengthening of state legislatures as presently constituted. Questions of reapportionment, of representation in the legislature, proportional representation, unicameralism, and certain mechanics of procedure such as electrical voting were not treated in the final report.

Although the Legislative Reference Service in the Library of Congress has existed for a good many years, it was not until 1946 that increased financial support and increased staff made it possible for “L.R.S.” to render the service that friends of the legislative reference idea had long felt that it should. Under Section 203 of the Legislative Reorganization Act, the Service was authorized and directed to appoint senior specialists in various fields “to be available for special work with the appropriate committees of Congress, and upon request to advise and assist any committee of either House or any joint committee in the analysis, appraisal, and evaluation of legislative proposals pending before it, or of recommendations submitted to Congress, by the President or any executive agency, and otherwise to assist in furnishing a basis for the proper determination of measures before the committee.‘ The services of such staff members are available also for members of Congress individually.

Before proceeding further with the discussion of the expansion of the Service made possible by recent legislation, it may be desirable to outline the nature of the existing organization, and to indicate briefly the character of the services which it renders. The Legislative Reference Service as a whole is one of the departments of the Library of Congress. It functions under Dr. Ernest S. Griffith, who has been Director since 1940. For administrative purposes, the work has been divided among six different sections, each of which has its own different and peculiar responsibilities.

The interest and significance of the postwar municipal elections held in Britain can best be appreciated if they are seen against wartime conditions on the one hand and the reconstruction tasks which confront local authorities on the other.

In England, as elsewhere, local government was designed to promote the arts of peace. But for six years during World War II it was asked to shoulder burdens of the most formidable kind directly connected with the war effort. The decision to make local authorities responsible, under the guidance of the Ministry of Home Security and its regional commissioners, for the complex of functions comprised under civil defense was a momentous one. Never before in Britain or any other country had local authorities been asked to undertake a task of such magnitude and importance as that of providing air-raid shelters, wardens and fire-guard posts in almost every street, gas decontamination centers, light and heavy rescue squads, evacuation schemes, emergency feeding and reception centers for those rendered homeless by enemy air attack, furniture stores, rest homes, a first-aid repair service for houses, and various other items of this kind.

The Ministry of Food placed heavy duties on both local-government officers and councilors in connection with food control and rationing; and local authorities provided cheap restaurants and canteens on a large scale. The Ministry of Fuel and Power drew largely on the resources of municipal administration in appointing local fuel overseers and their staffs for regulating the distribution and consumption of solid and liquid fuel.

The swing to the left, discernible at present in many countries, has given a new urgency to the old problem of hyphenating the politics of democracy to the economics of socialism. What was in the past mainly a matter of theoretical discussion and parliamentary rhetoric has shifted to the stage of legislative enactment and executive application. It is worth while, therefore, to pay attention to some of the world's smaller states whose experiments over a number of decades are pointers along the path now trodden by larger nations like Britain. One of these smaller communities which has persistently moved in a socialist direction by piecemeal and peaceable methods is New Zealand.

The history of New Zealand as a state organized along Western European lines can count but a little over a hundred years. Just because of its youth, however, this nineteenth-century colony and twentieth-century Dominion has provided from its birth a fertile field for governmental activity. The discovery of New Zealand by Tasman and Cook, and to a large extent the early colonization and settlement by white immigrants, were due to public enterprise. The extension of state functions was facilitated from the beginning by the vesting of large tracts of land in the Crown, and was necessitated by the inadequacy of available private capital.

Recent concern with the liberal arts curriculum as evinced by the report of the Harvard committee on General Education in a Free Society, Colgate's adoption of a core curriculum, and a thorough reëxamination of their entire educational program by scores of other institutions sharpens the recurrent problem of attempting better integration within the constituent parts of the curriculum. Whenever political scientists, talking shop, lapse into general principles, there is inevitable discussion concerning the nature and focus of political science itself. Much hard thinking has been done on the subject. There is, however, as in every profession where individual specialties are earnestly pursued, a tendency toward intellectual myopia, a tendency to miss, by default rather than consciously, a synoptic view of the subject. This has resulted in a lack of integration, of comprehensive design, of sense of balanced purpose, in many political science curricula.

The miscellany of unrelated, overlapping courses which one sometimes encounters in college or university catalogues, to say nothing of the neglect of important aspects of government, indicates that the political science curriculum has received inadequate analysis. Political scientists who teach are educators as well, and thereby have a dual professional responsibility to present their field of inquiry as an integrated, comprehensive whole, elucidated by specific course offerings. Only thus can political science realize its richest contribution to liberal education as well as to an understanding of the political process within and beyond academic halls.