Citizenship & Other Cases

Under a U.S. law a citizen who goes or stays abroad in wartime to avoid military service has been subject to loss of citizenship. Last week the Supreme Court struck down that law. It was the first time in five years that the court had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional.

The ruling covered two separate cases. One man, Francisco Mendoza-Martinez, born in the U.S. of Mexican parents, by his own admission went to Mexico during World War II to escape the draft. The other man, Joseph Henry Cort, born in the U.S. and now resident in Communist Czechoslovakia, remained in England during the Korean war, failing to answer communications from his draft board.

The Supreme Court's majority opinion, written by Justice Arthur Goldberg, the court's newest member, argued that under the Fifth and Sixth amendments "punishment cannot be imposed without a prior criminal trial and all its incidents, including indictment, notice, confrontation, jury trial, assistance of counsel, and compulsory process for obtaining witnesses." Even in wartime, Goldberg argued, Congressional powers "are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process."

The 5-4 decision splintered the court even more than usual. Only Chief Justice Earl Warren joined Goldberg without ado. Hugo Black and William O. Douglas went along, but added their own farther-reaching view that "Congress has no power" to deprive a native-born citizen of citizenship. William J. Brennan Jr. wrote a separate concurring opinion. The other four Justices dissented, in two separate opinions, basically on the ground that, as Potter Stewart put it, loss of citizenship is not "punishment in the constitutional sense of that term," but an effect of a "regulatory measure" enacted to deal with a "basic problem of wartime morale."

In other decisions last week, the Supreme Court:

> Declared unconstitutional the censorship activities of Rhode Island's Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth. The law setting up the commission granted it no enforcement powers, but by sending out threateningly phrased letters the commission had cowed Rhode Island distributors into curbing circulation of several sexy paperback books and numerous issues of girlie magazines.

> Upheld a jury verdict awarding $625,000 damages to a man whose legs were amputated as a result of an infection traced to an insect bite. James Gallick, a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad crew foreman, had been bitten by a "large insect" (species unknown) while working near a pool of stagnant and putrid water on railroad property in Cleveland. In his suit, Gallick held that the insect would not have been there to bite him if it had not been for the pool. The railroad's lawyers argued that the connections if any, between the water and what happened to Gallick "were beyond the realm of reasonable probability or foreseeability." In its ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed the principle that the "tortfeasor" (the party that commits the wrongful act) "must compensate his victim for even the improbable or unexpectedly severe consequences."

> Ruled that U.S. labor laws do not apply to foreign-flag ships even when they are controlled by U.S. corporations. At the request of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s National Maritime Union, the National Labor Relations Board had ordered a representation election among the crewmen of ships flying the flag of Honduras and manned by Hondurans, but under the control of Boston's United Fruit Co. Said the majority opinion, written by Justice Clark: the NLRB order violated "the well-established rule of international law that the law of the flag state ordinarily governs the internal affairs of a ship."

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