"Hot Dog" at Home

One of the happiest of the "happy hot dogs" whom Harvard Law School's Professor Felix Frankfurter is supposed to have hand-picked to put across the New Deal, had reason last week to be happier than ever. Now 39, now dean of the University of Wisconsin's Law School, good-natured, baldish, ruddy-cheeked Lloyd Kirkham Garrison whose famed great-grandfather helped free the slaves, grinned with pleasure as Governor Philip La Follette signed a new law to free debt-bur-dened low-income earners in Wisconsin from the legal restraints of garnishment.

Liberal young Lawyer Garrison crusaded against shyster ambulance chasers and bankruptcy grafters in New York City in the late 19205, was called by President Herbert Hoover to undertake national bankruptcy studies for the Department of Justice in 1930. President Roosevelt called him to be chairman of the National Labor Relations Board in 1934, later a member of the short-lived Federal Mediation Board for the steel strike. His decision in the Houde case (TIME, Sept. 10, 1934), ruling that representatives of the majority could bargain for all employes, has since become the Wagner Act's chief Labor weapon. Wisconsin's new law, suggested by Dean Garrison, may well become equally significant in the philosophy of individual indebtedness.

Bankruptcy laws of today were not part of the old common law. A bankrupt was treated as a criminal. Statutes eventually freed debtors from the fear of prison and by passing through bankruptcy m his own community a man could be released from all his debts anywhere in the U. S. except for taxes and debts for fraud or willful injury. Yet thousands of indebted individuals, because of distaste for bankruptcy or ignorance or inability to take advantage of bankruptcy provisions, have suffered the penalty of having their wages or salaries attached under garnishment proceedings. There were an estimated 2,200 such cases in Wisconsin during fiscal 1936.

Wisconsin's new law offers a sort of personal receivership to debtors earning less than $2,400 a year. By applying to the District Court the debtor may protect himself from garnishee actions for a period of two years during which a referee designated by the court supervises paying off his bills in installments, sees to it that he is allowed enough of his earnings to feed and care for his dependents.

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