The Week

We note with pleasure, in a brief news item about a diamond-bearing meteorite, that there exists something called The Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Now will the Center please stop piddling around with meteorites and get busy on John Kerry, Paul McCloskey, Fred Harris, Harold Hughes, Charles Goodell, the Midi, Cesar Chavez, mercury poisoning, Jim Garrison, Eugene McCarthy, Anguilla, Bernadette Devlin, Jerome Tuccille, the Fort Hood Three, the Harrisburg Seven, H. Rap Brown, China’s low profile, Henry Kissinger’s stomach ache, Charles Reich, Father Groppi, bra-burning, Amchitka (special non-longevity award), Birch Bayh, Peace in Our Time and everybody’s attention span?

Hard cases, the saying goes in the legal profession, make bad law. But that does not preclude easy cases from doing the same. Last week the Supreme Court declared that an Idaho statute which gave men a preference over women in administering decedents’ estates denied women that equal protection of the law which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. Now as a matter of fact women administer estates all the time, even, presumably, in Idaho, and all the statute did was, in a case where a man and woman applied to administer the same estate, to give a preference to the man. The preference is unreasonable—that part’s easy—and the Court found the statute unconstitutional. The Court did not rule that all laws which distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional but only those which cannot be shown to relate reasonably to the subject matter of the law. The chicklibsymps would like it to have been the other way around, that all laws which make distinctions on the basis of sex are presumed to be unconstitutional unless a showing of good reason could be made. But that is not how the Court rules. The sensible result of the decision will be. that each statute attacked will have to be considered on its own merits, the outcome depending on the reasonableness, as perceived by the particular court, of the statute in question.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

We note with pleasure, in a brief news item about a diamond-bearing meteorite, that there exists something called The Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Now will the Center please stop piddling around with meteorites and get busy on John Kerry, Paul McCloskey, Fred Harris, Harold Hughes, Charles Goodell, the Midi, Cesar Chavez, mercury poisoning, Jim Garrison, Eugene McCarthy, Anguilla, Bernadette Devlin, Jerome Tuccille, the Fort Hood Three, the Harrisburg Seven, H. Rap Brown, China’s low profile, Henry Kissinger’s stomach ache, Charles Reich, Father Groppi, bra-burning, Amchitka (special non-longevity award), Birch Bayh, Peace in Our Time and everybody’s attention span?

Hard cases, the saying goes in the legal profession, make bad law. But that does not preclude easy cases from doing the same. Last week the Supreme Court declared that an Idaho statute which gave men a preference over women in administering decedents’ estates denied women that equal protection of the law which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. Now as a matter of fact women administer estates all the time, even, presumably, in Idaho, and all the statute did was, in a case where a man and woman applied to administer the same estate, to give a preference to the man. The preference is unreasonable—that part’s easy—and the Court found the statute unconstitutional. The Court did not rule that all laws which distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional but only those which cannot be shown to relate reasonably to the subject matter of the law. The chicklibsymps would like it to have been the other way around, that all laws which make distinctions on the basis of sex are presumed to be unconstitutional unless a showing of good reason could be made. But that is not how the Court rules. The sensible result of the decision will be. that each statute attacked will have to be considered on its own merits, the outcome depending on the reasonableness, as perceived by the particular court, of the statute in question.