No Dragnets

New York was not the only state with a law designed to bar subversive teachers from public schools, but it had one of the newest and toughest. The Feinberg law (TIME, April 11) empowered schools to dismiss teachers because of membership in any organization that the state Board of Regents had listed as "subversive." When the legislature passed the act last spring, cries of alarm rose from civic groups and teachers' unions as well as from the Communists who were its main target.

Last week, after test cases brought by the Communist Party and a teachers' group, State Supreme Court Justice Harry E. Schirick declared the law a bill of attainder (i.e., a legislative act that punishes without trial) and therefore unconstitutional. In its vagueness, said Schirick, the act was a "dragnet which may enmesh anyone who agitates for a change of Government."

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