On January 19, 1971, President Nixon, catching most White House observers by surprise, issued a terse, 275-word statement halting further construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal. This was imperative, the President declared, “to prevent potentially serious environmental damages” and was done at the urging of the new Council on Environmental Quality; the Council v/arned that the project “could endanger the unique wildlife of the area and destroy this region of unusual and unique natural beauty.” Thus was the nation notified that the canal, weighed by the President against the newly minted values expressed in the National Environmental Policy Act, had been judged a $50 million mistake.

In the reform literature on the police, ranging from Hopkins' Our Lawless Police and the Wickersham Commission Reports in the 1930s to the Presidential Commissions of the 1960s, the argument has always been made that effective police reform waits upon professionalization. It is implied that better personnel, with better training, will provide better performance of police tasks. The recruitment and training proposals that are offered suggest that criteria such as a college degree are necessary in order to encourage adherence to “high professional standards of law enforcement.” Few have challenged the implicit assumption that professionalization is indeed efficacious, despite the fact that clear evidence of better performance has never been offered.

On the fourth day of the Detroit riots (1967), newspapers reported that three Negroes had been killed in a sniper battle at the Algiers Motel. The night before — Tuesday, July 25 — rumors of sniping were widespread. Responding to a telephone report of shots fired in the vicinity, a number of Detroit police officers, State Troopers and National Guardsmen rushed into the annex of the Algiers Motel. Inside, they found ten black men and two white girls. No guns were found. The police began questioning them. One hour later, when the police left, three of the men lay dead [Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, and Auburey Pollard], shot at close range. The others, including the two girls, had been severely beaten (Hersey, 1968; insert ours).

In his recent book, Charles E. Silberman underscores the role of the law as an educating institution. “Since means shape ends, the kinds of legal procedures the society develops shape the goals and values and indeed the whole character and ethos of the society” (Silberman, 1970: 42). He convincingly argues that the attempts in recent years to provide legal services to the poor have necessitated radical changes in the conception of the lawyer's role. “For one thing, he becomes an educator in a much more specific way, since the first (and perhaps most important) part of his job may be to educate the poor to what their rights are” (Silberman, 1970:43). Yet it is not only the poor who have difficulty when it comes to understanding the laws of society, and many people have been confronted with situations in which they have, after the fact, discovered that what they have done was illegal. The My Lai trials may be simply an extreme case in point. In the defense of Lt. Calley, the lawyers in the case were expected to argue that the defendant did not know the difference between a legal and illegal order and such an argument was used successfully in the similar Diener case. Yet the old adage has it that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” In many lesser situations citizens are unsure as to what their legal responsibilities are or what others legally have the right to do or not do.

Of the many enduring myths which serve as the foundation for American democracy, none is as pervasive as that of judicial objectivity. While the assertion that justice is blind is probably met with understandable cynicism, most Americans still believe that their judges, especially those in the appellate courts, should approach their responsibilities with a certain myopia. The rules and customs that are the foundation of Anglo-American legal practices may be considered the basis upon which judicial objectivity rests.

One special public which presumably pays a good deal of attention to the United States Supreme Court is the bar. As part of the “company” attached to the judiciary, attorneys may have a philosophic interest — and surely have a bread-and-butter interest — in the activities of the country's highest tribunal. This article seeks to explore that concern.