The Supreme Court of the United States was dominated for almost two decades by the philosophy of Mr. Justice Sutherland. Even prior to becoming an Associate Justice, October 2, 1922, he had been a figure of national prominence for over twenty years, serving one term as congressman, 1898–1900, and two terms as senator, 1905–1917. His retirement, January 16 of this year, closes the more active phases of a long career in public service. Throughout he has shown himself a man of firm convictions and pronounced views, whether expressed on the floors of Congress, in public addresses, or in Supreme Court opinions. Yet little, almost nothing, has been published on his life, thought, and work, as was contemporaneously done with respect to Justices Holmes and Brandeis.

This neglect of judicial biography has been noticed by Dean Charles E. Clarke of the Yale Law School. Writing in the Nation of June 12, 1937, he observed: “Many of the books which needed to be written on judicial supremacy have now been completed.

According to the textbooks of publicists, and according to the formal rules of international law, Ethiopia possessed certain well defined rights, and as a state was legally equal to all other states. Her position in the world, legally considered,was secure, buttressed as it was by a formidable array of rights such as “existence” and “self-defense.” Yet when it came to discussing the fate of Ethiopia, students of international affairs did not run to their law books, but focussed their attention upon happenings in Rome, Paris, London, and possibly Geneva. China, too, is a state, endowed with a legal right to exist on equal terms in what is euphemistically called the “family of nations.” But Far Eastern events are determined and shaped but little by legal rules; rather it is the policies of Japan and the other Great Powers which actually condition the flow of events and govern the future of China. Situations such as these are by no means exceptional, and lead many to the conclusion that they make for “a world without an effective system of public international law, in which force is the determining factor between nations [and in which] only Great Powers, by reason of their disproportionate strength, can invest their national policies with real international importance.”

For some time, students of state government and state administration have been puzzled, and perhaps somewhat dismayed, at their inability to measure objectively the accomplishments of the governments of the several states. The same general problem was presented from another angle when, at a round table held in connection with the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago in December, 1936, the attempt was made to measure objectively the results of the administrative reorganization code movement. If standards of achievement could be agreed upon, it might be possible for different investigators, working independently, to examine the same states with similar or comparable results. It should, likewise, be possible to compare the government of a given state before and after the adoption of a code providing for administrative reorganization, and to compare with some degree of accuracy the governments of states of similar size, population, industrial characteristics, etc.