For Associate Editor Jose M. Ferrer III, our Law writer for the past six years. May and June have always been busy months, because of the many Supreme Court decisions usually handed down before the summer recess. This year, in addition, Ferrer has had his hands full dealing with the crucial and complex legal problems surrounding Watergate. In our May 28 issue, for example, the Law section examined some of the issues and precedents concerning the impeachment of a U.S. President. Two weeks later, Law focused on the complexities of granting immunity to Watergate witnesses. In the issue of June 18, the section examined two more Watergate questions: the effect of radio and TV coverage on future legal proceedings, and a matter that was brought up indirectly at last week's hearings -- whether the President could be required to testify before the Ervin committee. In this week's TIME Essay, Ferrer directs his attention to the remarkably large number of lawyers involved in the scandal.

Ferrer once considered going into law himself. But a stronger ambition prevailed; after working a few summers for U.P.I, and a stint during his senior year in college as chairman of the Daily Princetonian, he opted for journalism. He came to Time Inc.

after graduation in 1961, put in 13 months with Time Inc.'s house newspaper, f.y.i., then joined TIME as our Milestones writer. For the next four years, Ferrer wrote for a variety of sections, including People, Show Business, Medicine, Science, Modern Living and, finally, Law.

"I've always wanted to be a journalist and something else at the same time," he says. That dual ambition was partially satisfied when Ferrer won a Stanford professional journalism fellowship in 1968, entitling him to attend Stanford Law School for six months. Concentrating primarily on constitutional and criminal law, he resisted the urgings of a professor who wanted him to remain for a full degree and came back to TIME.

"I love the law," he says, "but I like having enough distance to be its observer. So many events in this country are finally subjected to the logic of the law that in watching the process, I come in contact with almost every aspect of American life."

For this week's Essay, contact was somewhat difficult, for Ferrer did much of his writing in a hospital bed while undergoing further treatment for an injury received four years ago in a motorcycle accident. There was one advantage to being confined, he says. "The doctors got started very early in the morning, and after they were through there was nothing else to do but sit up and get to work." Ferrer relied heavily on background material supplied by Reporter-Researcher Harriet Heck, and on the files of Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer from New York, Joseph Boyce from Chicago and David Beckwith -- himself a lawyer -- from Washington.

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