Chief Justice on Morality

Is there an absolute distinction between right & wrong? Or are moral laws really a matter of changing times, changing customs?

Last week Americans were invited to take a sharp second look at an answer made by the nation's No. i judge. Wrote Chief Justice Vinson, in his majority opinion upholding the conviction of the eleven top U.S. Communists (TIME, June n): "Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes."

Commented the Christian Century:

"[Vinson's statement] plays into the hands of those who deny the existence of the moral law and, in public affairs, make the interests of the state the supreme morality ... So long as it remains the basis on which judicial interpretation operates, it is a threat to the moral future of the nation."

The Century's editors cheered an equally sturdy dissent by Felix Morley (in Barren's Weekly): "Our whole system of government is based on the assumption that there are certain absolute values, referred to in the Declaration of Independence as the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Did the Chief Justice of the United States really mean what he said? Quaker Morley gave him the benefit of the doubt: presumably Vinson wrote "at the close of a difficult and trying session" and "did not edit his opinion with customary care."

Whatever the explanation, Kentuckian Vinson's aside on morals drew no dissent from his brethren on the supreme bench. And no wonder. The doctrine he pronounced stems straight from the late Oliver Wendell Holmes, philosophical father of the present Supreme Court. In one way or another, it has been voiced by the court many times, notably by Justice Felix Frankfurter, longtime (1914-39) Harvard Law School professor, author of Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (1939), discoverer, under the New Deal, of scores of bright young men (the Happy Hot Dogs) for top Government positions.

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