The American Bar Association and the Supreme Court--Old Wine in a New Bottle?

Preparation of this article was commenced shortly after the emergence of the difference of opinion between the ABA and the City Bar on the practice of submitting the names of Supreme Court nominees to the ABA. We believed this to be a sufficiently important issue to deserve a thorough review, particularly because of a paucity of legal commentary on the subject. Our major attention is still directed to that issue, but the recent action of the Attorney General necessarily requires some expansion of the scope of this inquiry. We confine this study to the matter of selection of Supreme Court Justices because that Court, as many others have pointed out, is in fact unique in the frequency and importance of the constitutional, political, social, moral and economic problems which come before it. Such questions arise in lower federal courts and state courts too, but not with the same urgency and not with the same consequences for the American public. We do not intimate that distinguished legal ability should not be a prerequisite to appointment to the Court-quite the contrary-but only that a consideration of other qualifications may be of equal importance as a basis for selection of great judges for this great tribunal