Lawyers' Advice

Administrative law is the name lawyers have for rulings of Government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board, to whom "lawmaking" authority is delegated by Congress. With over 100 such agencies functioning today, administrative lawmakers rival judges and legislatures as a nuisance to lawyers. Last week the House of Delegates (legislative body) of the American Bar Association, to which 16% of U. S. lawyers subscribe, convened in Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel to discuss two new brands of nuisance insurance.

Up for the Delegates' consideration was a report commissioned over six years ago, finished in 1937, by a special committee on administrative law headed by Washington's Colonel O. R. McGuire. The report recommended that each Federal agency: 1) publish its detailed rules & regulations within 90 days after the law it administers goes into effect, and 2) set up a special three-man dispute board to review contested decisions before they are taken into court.

The implied criticism of the New Deal was enough to arouse Solicitor General Robert Houghwout Jackson. An ex officio member of the House of Delegates, he advised his colleagues: "Let's not spend our time tilting against windmills. . . The fact is, the record of administrative tribunals is slightly better than that of the lower courts, where appeals were made. Federal agencies won 64% of their cases, while lower courts were sustained in only 54% of the cases appealed, over a ten-year period."

Unimpressed, the Delegates approved the main provisions of the McGuire report, pledged A. B. A. support to getting them written into law. Going on to consider individual agencies, the Delegates judged the time unripe for comment on the Wages-&-Hours Administration (though they applauded its work to date), but they recommended three important amendments to NLRA:

> To let employers petition for an employes' election to choose their bargaining representative where no company union is involved;

> To forbid minority strikes and picketing after a majority bargaining agency has been certified;

> To outlaw sit-downs.

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