Atkin Dissenting

If a nation values anything more than freedom it will lose its freedom.

--Somerset Maugham.

Traditional among democratic freedoms is habeas corpus, established in England by the Magna Charta, in the U.S. by the Constitution. It gives imprisoned men the right to demand that either they be set free or the charges against them be examined. Without it, civil liberty ceases.

In London last week the right to habeas corpus was stoutly defended, war or no war, by bald, handsome James Richard Baron Atkin, 74, in a dissenting opinion likely to rank with some of those of the late great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Pithy and popular is Australian-born Lord Atkin, ardent Welshman by adoption, one of Parliament's five "law lords" (who act as a sort of supreme court, reviewing cases on points of national importance carried from the Court of Appeal). Lord Atkin is noted for his liberalism regarding divorce legislation. He once attacked a proposed bill to make divorce impossible until after five years of marriage, citing the case of a soldier whose wife had deceived him. Said Lord Atkin: "It seems to me a monstrous thing that that man should not have been entitled to be freed from that woman and to marry again for five years. ... I suppose he should have adjusted his personality. What he did was . . . shoot her."

In a test case last week, Lord Atkin dissented from his colleagues' opinion that, under the Emergency Powers (Defense) legislation, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison had the right to detain persons at his own discretion, not subject to court interference.

"In this country, even amid the clash of arms, laws are not silent.. It has always been . . . one of the principles of liberty for which, on recent authority, this country is now fighting, that judges . . . stand between the subject and any attempted encroachment of liberty by the executive, alert to see that any coercive action is justified by law.

"In this case I have listened to arguments which might have been addressed acceptably to a court of the king's Bench in the time of Charles I. ... But in English law every imprisonment is prima facie unlawful and puts a burden on the person directing the imprisonment of justifying his act."

Lord Atkin's dissent spoke for itself so loudly that Parliament planned to reconsider the Home Secretary's wartime powers.

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