Five to Four

When the Supreme Court hands down a decision by a five-to-four majority the scales of justice may well be said to hang by a hair. Such was the situation last week when the court of last resort upheld the provision of the Volstead Act which limits the amount of whiskey that physicians may prescribe to one pint every ten days. Paradoxically enough, this decision was written by Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who often dissents from decisions restricting individual "liberty."

The Supreme Court's ruling put an end to a suit begun in 1922 in the lower Federal courts by Samuel W. Lambert, learned physician of Manhattan, who sought to enjoin the Prohibition Unit from enforcing the provision concerning whiskey prescriptions. Justice Brandeis' opinion was upheld by Chief Justice Taft and associate Justices Holmes, Sanford, Van Devanter.

It may be a coincidence, and it may be prophetic of the future that three of the four dissenting justices (Sutherland, Butler, Stone) have been appointed to the Supreme Court since the enactment of the Federal Prohibition laws.

The majority of metropolitan newspapers, Democratic and Republican alike, denounced this decision in no mild accents. Perhaps the loudest of them was the Chicago Tribune.

"Will the Supreme Court's decision on medicinal alcohol prove to be the Dred Scott case of prohibition?

"It might well be. Certainly no conscientious physician in charge of a serious case will waive his judgment of the need of his patient because of the dictate of a legislature or the opinion of a bench of judges."