In the national House of Representatives that adjourned on March 4,1931, there were introduced 18,356 bills and resolutions, in the Senate 7,080, making a total of 25,436 in two years. Favorable reports were made in the House on 2,734. Of these measures, 747 died on the House calendars, that is, were not acted upon. Measures that passed the House and were not acted upon in the Senate numbered 537; those that passed the Senate and not the House, 381; making a total of 913 that fell between the branches.

The measures that became law numbered 1,524, a figure to be reconciled with the previous figures by taking into account the instances where identical bills were introduced in House and Senate and one of them was laid aside. It is to be borne in mind that individual pension bills are combined in two or three big bills, which makes the showing not quite so bad as it appears on the face. This, however, does not alter the fact that more than one quarter of the measures reported to the House were not acted upon at all, and that between 800 and 1,000 passed one branch and were not acted upon by the other.

The executive powers of the Emperor include: (1) appointments and general administration, (2) pardons, (3) organization of the army and navy, (4) declaration of war, (5) conclusion of peace and treaty-making, and (6) establishment of martial law.

Article X of the constitution defines the appointing power of the Emperor. His competence is not confined to mere selection of officials, since the constitution provides that “the Emperor determines the organization of the different branches of the administration, and the salaries of all civil and military officers, and appoints and dismisses the same.” Clearly, the appointing power of the Emperor is unlimited. There is no necessity for securing the consent of any confirming body. The Emperor is thus unhampered by the restrictions that bind the president of the United States. This prerogative also extends to the power of dismissal—a potent instrument for the promotion of executive efficiency as well as autocracy.

While hundreds of “hunger-marchers” milled about outside, the first session of the Seventy-second Congress convened on the first Monday of last December. The mob outside lent a tone that was recurrent in a Congress given over to the consideration of national need and budget-balancing. Often lacking either in leadership or in the will to follow, Congress went its muddled way working against great odds and confronted with tasks of great complexity. The delicacy of the party balance as much as the spur of emergency pointed to the desirability of forgetting partisanship in the presence of national distress. Whether this pious attitude rendered less frequent actions dictated by political expediency remains open to question. In fact, special interests were particularly clamorous during this session.

The development of Anglo-American law has been greatly influenced by certain theories and doctrines which have directed and conditioned the evolution of administrative law. Foremost among these are the political and legal theory of the separation of governmental powers and a juridical doctrine relating to the nature and scope of law itself. Briefly, the theory of the separation of powers, which is commonly announced as a fundamental principle of American constitutional law, and is implicit in some phases of English law, is to the effect that laws are made by the legislature, executed by the executive, and interpreted and applied by the courts. As a correlative of this doctrine, it is understood as essential that none of these departments may delegate powers which properly belong to it to either of the other departments, in order that, as the Massachusetts constitution expresses it, “there shall be a government of laws and not of men.”

An analysis of administrative law cases which federal and state courts decided during 1931 reveals some exceptionally interesting problems and tendencies. These will be considered under the following main headings: (1) the separation of powers and administrative action, (2) principles regulating administrative determinations, (3) conclusiveness and appeal, (4) the law of officers, (5) the liability of officers, (6) community liability, and (7) the remedies against abuse of power.

In 1929, the University of Chicago Press published the first intensive study of the prestige rating of municipal employment, the results of an experiment enlisting the cooperation of over 5,000 residents of Chicago and yielding over 90,000 separate expressions of opinion on the relative status of municipal and private employment. The results of this inquiry were disturbing. The prestige of municipal employment in Chicago appeared to be less than that of corresponding private employment, and special inquiries into the integrity, courtesy, and competence of city employees revealed serious lack of public confidence.

Chapter 33 of the Laws of 1931 of the state of Wisconsin authorized the establishment of an executive council. Chapter 361 authorized the council to appoint a committee on business economics with certain functions. These two measures (which now constitute Chapter 15 of the Wisconsin Statutes, Sections .001 to .005 inclusive) resulted from the recommendation made to the legislature by Governor Philip LaFollette in his first message, presented on January 15, 1931. The governor called attention to the need that popular representative government provide a responsible and efficient alternative to direct action in view of post-war developments throughout the world.

Republican Germany elected its sixth Reichstag under the "Weimar constitution on July 31. The largest vote ever cast for a Reichstag membership was recorded at this election—about thirty-eight million people, or 83.2 per cent of the qualified voters, casting ballots. Despite the predictions of disorder, and even violent revolution, the election day was quiet and orderly. Thousands of Germans, taking advantage of the liberal absentee voting law, voted at pleasure resorts where they had gone to spend the week-end. A certificate from the home precinct enables a German citizen to vote anywhere in the Reich. In the cities, voters waited in long lines at the polling places; but there was no congestion, for the actual voting took but a fraction of a minute and the whole voting procedure was well systematized.

The representativeness of the Soviet system of government can best be ascertained, not through abstract inquiry into constitutional provisions, but by means of an analysis of the electorate and of the elected. Only in this way can the contentions of Soviet apologists and theoreticians be given an adequate test of reality. Simultaneously, such data should disclose a number of sociological and psychological implications. A recent publication of the Central Electoral Commission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. gives a comprehensive view of the electorate and of the elected in the elections of Soviets held in the year 1931.