Rights of the Citizen

The constitutional liberties of the in dividual citizen are a never-ending preoccupation of the law. Three recent examples:

> In the past, at least 18 Negroes have tried to crack Cincinnati's all-white Local 212 of the International Brother hood of Electrical Workers, but none has been better qualified or more persistent than Anderson L. Dobbins, 37. A graduate of Virginia's Hampton Institute, a predominantly Negro liberal arts college, he passed a city electrician's exam in Newport News, Va. In Cincinnati, he tried off and on for years to join the local--in vain. The union said he had to get work before he could be a member; the employers said he could not work without a union card. Last month, in a direct attack on color barriers in trade unions, a U.S. district court found that the local had violated not only the 1964 Civil Rights Act but also a 102-year-old post-Civil War statute that was only recently invoked by the Supreme Court to bar bias in housing. Following up his 86-page decision, Judge Timothy S. Hogan: 1) ordered Dobbins' admission to the union, 2) temporarily suspended union hiring-hall practices, by which jobs are dispensed "at the particular whim of the business agent," and 3) insisted on a new system of hiring based on training and experience rather than race or union membership.

> To prevent the birth of malformed children, many doctors all over the U.S. perform abortions on women who contract German measles early in pregnancy. Yet such operations are still considered criminal acts, except in a few states (Colorado, North Carolina and Maryland). Three years ago, a few California doctors challenged their own state's restrictive abortion law by publicly announcing that they had aborted German-measles victims.* Now, a California superior court has handed down a ruling that contradicts the California law and challenges similar laws in other states as well. Not only do many doctors regard such abortions as accepted medical practice, declared Judge Andrew J. Eyman, but laws that deny them to women are a clear violation of their constitutional rights. For his authority, he cited the Eighth Amendment (which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment") and the 14th Amendment (which guarantees "due process" and "equal protection" of the law).

* Though the California law has since been liberalized, it permits abortions only in cases of rape, incest or clear danger to the mother's mental as well as physical health.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.