THINKING ABOUT OCTOBER

"Will you trust my judgment, Mr. Fortas?", asked the salesman at Welch's Hardware Store in Westport, Conn. Dubiously, the Chief Justice-designate of the U.S. fingered the new, chemically treated dustcloth, examining it carefully by sight and feel. Finally, aware perhaps that this was a matter beyond his competence, he concurred with the clerk's opinion. Tramping around the narrow streets of Westport, accompanied by TIME Washington Bureau Chief John Steele, Fortas was enjoying the scruffy anonymity of any other summer refugee from the city. In baggy grey pants, a flame-red cardigan sweater, scuffed brown shoes (one with a tongue missing) and a floppy white yachtsman's hat (a 58th-birthday present from his wife ten days earlier), he carted three bags of soiled linen to the laundry, then, pausing occasionally to consult a neat shopping list, picked up gold-covered paper matchbooks, a dustpan, a broom, clothes hooks, cleanser and a package of frozen pureed spinach.

The morning in town was followed by an afternoon at the rambling summer house atop Minute Man Hill, which has an enormous veranda with a view of Long Island Sound when the sun breaks through the mists. Fortas kept busy scrubbing the winter's grit off the windows. Now and then, he would wheel a load of manure to his wife, Carolyn, who was working on the garden, soggy from the unseasonably heavy spring rains.

The scene was a long way from the day next October when Fortas, given Senate approval, will take his place in the center of the Supreme Court bench. Yet, even now, as he talked with Reporter Steele, the bench was never far from his mind.

He foresaw new challenges, new problems for the court--the Fortas court. "It was one thing to have enunciated great principles," Fortas says of the Warren era, which he admires greatly. "But it is another thing to make them come alive." There would be new concerns as the Justices explored the terms and conditions of welfare programs, which are based on confusing and sometimes ambiguous laws, and there would probably be a re-examination of the relationship between the courts and the federal regulatory agencies. The operation of the federal courts themselves is a matter for concern for the man who, as Chief Justice, would be charged with the overall administration of the entire federal judicial system. With ever-lengthening dockets, there are long delays in reaching decisions, long delays in rendering justice.

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The Justices of the Supreme Court, Fortas mused, are, in some respects, "nine emperors." A Chief Justice can neither coerce nor cajole his associates; he can do little more than recommend what actions they should take. They are the "mix in the carburetor"--a good court needs Justices from different backgrounds. In applying the law, in his view, the Justices should not be as concerned as they sometimes have been in "squeezing" judicial decisions into a neat pattern. They should instead make full use of all the modern tools; not only law, but medicine, psychiatry, mass psychology, economics and social engineering. Fortas himself is thinking of equipping his office with a computer console to tap the memory bank of social knowledge and data assembled by the Russell Sage Foundation, of which he is a trustee. More and more the courts "enter into everybody's life every day, from pre-womb to post-tomb," and a many-sided approach, using all the disciplines, could result in something more satisfactory than "the frustrations and agonies of undebatable principle in sharp conflict with undeniable fact."

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