The United States Supreme Court: 1951-1952

Abstract

NOBODY WILL SAY it was a quiet term. The total number of cases decided was again small, only eighty-nine all told. There was the usual quota of trivia, and maybe a little over; more piddling points on statutes of limitations, for example, than posterity is ever going to want to know about. But there was enough serious national business to make the term memorable. Every region felt the effects; Hollywood won a slight reprieve from censorship, while school children and their teachers in New York got no reprieve at all from school time religious training and loyalty purges, respectively. Illinoisans were warned to hold their tongues if they would disparage groups, Oregon discovered that maltreatment by its medical organizations of experiments in group medicine occurred too long ago to count, and the South postponed for a year any consideration of its basic problem of school segregation. In more international perspective, a Japanese- American traitor and military courts in Germany were subjects of decisions, and aliens within the United States had a murderously bad time with a series of cases reflecting a renewed chauvinism in legislative policy. Finally there was the steel case.