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No changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court occurred during the 1955 Term.Noteworthy among publications dealing with the Court and with constitutional law which appeared during the period under review were a first biography of James Wilson, a member of the original Court; symposia on the late Justice Roberts, the late Professor Thomas Reed Powell, and Justice Black; several interesting reappraisals of John Marshall; and additional installments of Professor Mason's important work on Justice Stone. A full scale critique of Charles Beard's interpretation of the Constitution was published, as well as a variety of writings on historical aspects of the Court, and on a wide range of problems of judicial practice and public law.

It is a truism of state constitutional law that states have plenary authority over local governments. Some scholars believe that giving local governments more power would be an appropriate reform. A review of the school finance and exclusionary zoning litigations of the past two decades, however, indicates that local governments have considerable autonomy and that many state courts are committed to notions of local control. This state court commitment to localism has frequently been grounded in concerns for protection of the home and family. Such localism is problematic given the limited fiscal capacity of many localities and the external effects of certain local actions. Many localities would, in fact, be better off if the states were compelled to assume greater oversight and fiscal responsibility for local affairs.

There was no change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1952 Term. But following the close of the Term, on September 8, 1953, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who had been appointed to the Court by President Truman in 1946, died unexpectedly at the age of 63. To replace him President Eisenhower gave a recess appointment to Governor Earl Warren of California on October 2. The new Chief Justice was sworn in on October 5.Two important developments in the constitutional law field during the period under review occurred outside the Court. One was the publication by the Government Printing Office, in 1953, of a newly revised annotatedConstitution of the United States, prepared by the Legislative Reference Service under the editorship of Edward S. Corwin. The annotations come down to June 30, 1952. The last annotated Constitution was published in 1938 under the editorship of W. C. Gilbert. The new work, an ample book of about 1400 large pages, is indispensable for students of American government.Noteworthy also was the appearance of the first two volumes of William Winslow Crosskey's monumental study of the American Constitution, under the title ofPolitics and the Constitution in the History of the United States.

The personnel of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1959 Term. From the point of view of the decisions rendered in the public law field, this was an undistinguished Term. Few of the constitutional cases are likely to hold an important place among the precedents, and a considerable number of well-argued decisions turned entirely upon private law questions. But there was no dearth of writing, during the period under review, about the Court as an institution and about the Justices who sit there.Note may be made at this point of the latest chapter in the long dispute over the so-called tidelands. In 1947 the Supreme Court had ruled that, as against the claims of California, the United States possessed paramount rights in lands underlying the Pacific Ocean seaward from the low-water mark. Similar rulings were made in 1950 as regards the claims of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the enactment in 1953 of the Submerged Lands Act, the United States relinquished to the coastal states all of its rights in all lands beneath navigable waters within the three-mile limit, and in excess of that limit within state boundaries as they existed at the time a state became a member of the Union, or as theretofore approved by Congress. The limit of the grant was three leagues (about ten and one-half miles) in the Gulf of Mexico and three geographical miles in the Atlantic and Pacific. The actual extent of the claims of the coastal states involved in the question was therefore left to be settled by litigation.