"Superior Authority"?

In the state where it was hatched, the Charter of the United Nations fluttered home to roost last week. A California court of appeals used it to throw out a California law. The opinion, if upheld, might scatter confusion through the laws of the 48 states.

The opinion was delivered in the case of Sei Fujii, a sad-faced little Japanese who had bought a piece of Los Angeles real estate, but could not get legal title because of California's Alien Land Act. Under the act--which has been regularly attacked and just as regularly upheld by both state and federal courts for almost 30 years--aliens who are ineligible for citizenship may not own California land. Los Angeles Attorney J. Marion Wright argued that the Alien Land Act conflicted with the Charter of the U.N. The three appeals judges pondered, and decided, in fact, that Wright was right.

Wrote Judge Emmett Wilson in the court's opinion: "The position of this country in the family of nations . . . demands that every state in the Union accept and act upon the [U.N.] Charter according to its plain language." In plain language the Charter declares it the intention of the U.N. "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights" and pledges all the signers to respect such rights "without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

The Charter (the judges argued), like any other treaty made by the U.S., has become "the supreme law of the land . . . paramount to every law of every state in conflict with it. The Alien Land law must therefore yield to the treaty as the superior authority . . ."

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