The Mail Box

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Conscience compels me to voice disagreement with your editorial attempt to justify the Law Review action in refusing to extend a membership invitation to an eligible. The tonor of your article indicates a certain insularity from fact, a propensity to reach ostensibly satisfactory conclusions from incorrect propositions.

I took the liberty of discussing the problem with one of the Review editors who saw fit to vote with the majority. From that discussion, I learned that the present Review invitees have no official standing as yet, that they are experiencing a probationary period, and that eventual election or rejection will turn on the performances rendered during this trial period. Professional achievement alone warrants an invitation to participate. The eligible in question was peremptorily denied an opportunity to prove his ability to work honestly for the Review. You suggest that the eligible's own testimony before a public board of inquiry is sufficiently condemnatory to preclude the possibility of honest effort for the organ. Verdict before trial may be an incident of some legal system you espouse; fortunately, it is foreign to our own.

But the real point in issue is not the qualifications of the individual concerned. I reach the point merely to clarify a misconception you have fostered in the minds of your readers. Another misconception you advance relates to the degree of innuendo that could be imparted to a Note by a single writer. The truism you mouth, that "mere academic success entitles him to neither a forum for ideology or an instrument for hidden purposes" successfully skirts a disclosure of the technique by which the Review Notes are composed, thus denying your readers an unassisted evaluation of the risk of harm created. The Notes are an anonymous, collaborative effort, laboriously checked for inaccuracy by many individuals, including (it is my understanding) members of the faculty. That a Note could be used as a vehicle for the promotion of a political philosophy repugnant to other members of the group, is utter nonsense. It must be obvious that the technique employed accounts, for example, for misinterpretation of an explosive Constitutional issue dealing with Negroes when that issue is handled by a Southern member of the Review. To state categorically that the eligible concerned is too suspect to run the risk of realization of the harm anticipated, to connote that membership in the Review carries with it such terrible power for evil, is to circumvent the issues and to condone an act that is in itself reprehensible as a manifestation of an autocratic power.

The Review is not a social organization where membership is subject to private whim. It is a board composed of the professionally superlative. To deny membership for personal reasons has no place in the scope of its work. It is inescapable as the reductio ad absurdum of such a proposition that the academically inferior five percent will inherit the organ through denial of privilege to those who earned the invitation and the opportunity to prove themselves.

No one can contest the argument that a position on the Review is subject to misuse, personal aggrandizement, the promotion of base ends. Every organization must provide itself with the means of dealing with incorrigibles and malcontents. The Review has been functioning ably for some sixty-six years. Established membership and/or impeachment procedure conforming to accepted democratic principles of government and fair play were adequate to cope with this problem. The real issue is whether the self-styled judges who took the peremptory action of refusal have promulgated, accepted, and administered some novel procedure during a single tenure whereby they achieve the sole discretionary power of rejection without review. It is neither inapt nor impertinent to suggest that, if the issue is answered in the affirmative, the political system under which the Review functions has profound similarities with that system the editors propose is the altar on which the eligible in question burns holy incense. The Review achieves in the field of its own forum the very result we agree is heinous--self-perpetuation by standards of conduct variable at will and without recourse. Robert Henigson 2L

It is wrong to infer that because invitation and election to the Law Review are hot contemporaneous, invited students must prove their ability to be elected. According to the present President of the Review, election is but a formality in ordinary cases, automatic for anyone invited. Delving into the group's history, he has yet to find a case where any man invited has been turned down later.

To think that Communist dominated persons should be invited, and if they behave later be admitted, is to forget how Communists operate. Of course they will behave. They will shine. For their stated purpose, spread across innumerable public records is to infiltrate groups like the Review, whether for their immediate purposes or to get training and prestige for better operation in the future.

To call the editors "autocratic" and "self-styled judges of fitness" disregards the fact that they only made their decision after exhaustive consultation with professors and lawyers. To say that democratic legal procedures have been violated is to presume that editorship on the Review is a right, and non-invitation is violation of some civil liberty. Neither is true.

It is too sweeping to say that membership cannot be denied for personal reasons, even though such reasons must be extremely strong to justify exclusion. The editors might use a common standard: whether the risk involved is worth the possible value of such a person to the Review. If we knew that Lubell was not directed to infiltrate the Review for subversive purposes; if we knew he was not goin to use the experience he gains to harm the legal profession; we would then be the first to urge he not be isolated from influence merely because of his political views. But we cannot believe this, for he will not deny it under oath. Because of this, the risk is substantial. And the success and reputation of the Law Review is more important than that of Lubell or any other student.--Ed.