Wechsler Asks for Reform Of Inept State Legislatures

Many state legislatures are incapable of handling legislation efficiently and stand in nedd of drastic reform, Herbert Wechsler, Stone Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia University, said yesterday.

"One of the most urgent tasks of law and government today is to attain state legislatures fashioned in a way that will enable them to deal with legislation," he told members of the Graduate Society and the Law School Alumni at their annual luncheon in Harkness Commons.

He listed, one by one, the legislatures' problems: "so few of our state legislatures (only ten of fifty at last count) envisage annual assemblies for the purposes of legislation.... 35 restrict a member's pay to $3500 a year or less and 23 impose a limit of some 90 days or less upon the length of legislative sessions."

Wechsler did not propose specific remedies for these problems -- and was not optimistic abou the possibility of getting remedies adopted in the near future.

But one way in which law school professors could help, he suggested, is in the drafting of national "model codes." Several such codes, one on land use and another on handling of suspects before trials, for example, are now being drafted at various law schools under the sponsorship of the American Law Institute.

In another speech before two groups, Gerald Piel '37, publisher of Scientific American and a member of the Board of Overseers, bemoaned the increasing separation of arts from sciences and the increasing belief that they cannot understand each other well.

"The 'and' in Faculty of Arts and Sciences used to be a simple conjunctive," he said. "Today, I fear, that little word has come to stand as a disjunctive."

Even titles of theses, Piel pointed out, become incomprehensible to students outside of the writer's discipline.

"The sun that presides without fail at every Harvard commencement starts up each year another round of a sedentary yet elevating outdoor sport," he said. "The name of the game is the decoding of the titles of theses."