Students of the history and working of representative legislative institutions in every part of the world where these institutions are in existence are under indebtedness to Professor Redlich for the thoroughness and completeness with which he has performed a task never before attempted by any historian of the house of commons. In his scholarly book, published in German in 1905, and now more generally available through Mr. Steinthal's admirable translation into English, supplemented by a chapter of twenty-one pages by Sir Courtenay Ilbert, Professor Redlich has traced the history of house of commons procedure from the earliest days down to the important time-economizing changes which were made in the first and second sessions of the parliament elected in January, 1906.

As far as my knowledge goes there are now in existence only two modern books—only two books published since the reform act of 1832—in which any detailed history of parliamentary procedure at Westminster is to be found.

The principal provisions of Sections 9 and 12 of the Hatch Act, designed to limit the political activities of federal employees and of certain state employees, were challenged in two cases decided by the Supreme Court in February, 1947, and held constitutional in both instances by a divided court.

Section 9 of the Hatch Act forbids most officers and employees in the executive branch of the federal government to take “any active part in political management or in political campaigns.” At the same time, all such persons are to “retain the right to vote as they may choose and to express their opinions on all political subjects and candidates.” The penalty for violation of the act is dismissal from the office or position held. A similar prohibition against taking part in political management or political campaigns is imposed by Section 12 of the act on any state or local employees whose principal employment is in connection with any activity financed in whole or in part by federal loans or grants. The activities prohibited are declared by Section 15 to be the same as those previously determined by the United States Civil Service Commission to be prohibited to employees in the classified civil service of the United States.

A whole barrage of charges was brought to bear against the constitutionality of this legislation. As applied to federal employees, the attack was centered on the second sentence of Section 9 of the act, which reads: “No officer or employee in the executive branch of the Federal Government … shall take any active part in political management or in political campaigns.”

Recent applications of more elaborate quantitative methods (e.g., bloc cluster analysis and Guttman scale procedures) to legislative politics have sharply improved the ability of political scientists to specify significant dimensions of voting behavior. Party affiliation, constituency characteristics and cohesion within state delegations have been correlated with the congressional vote in a number of subject matter areas. Because of the masses of data to be handled, however, even the best of these studies have been limited in scope to a single year or to one Congress. This restriction has not prevented the authors of these works from demonstrating clearly the utility of their methodology, but it has limited correspondingly either the generality or the reliability of their conclusions. The present study, limited to the single issue of congressional voting on foreign aid, is an attempt to discover, by the application of quantitative methods to votes over longer time periods, how far the relationships previously suggested persist over time or are peculiar to the individual sessions in which they occur.

The Natural Gas Act of 1938, as amended in 1942, requires natural-gas companies subject to the act to obtain certificates of public convenience and necessity from the Federal Power Commission before transporting or selling natural gas in interstate commerce, as well as before acquiring, constructing, or extending facilities for those purposes. The issuance of such certificates is a conventional function of public-utility regulatory bodies, and the Commission has administered it in a conventional manner. The tests developed by the Commission to determine the “public convenience and necessity,” relating primarily to the adequacy of natural gas reserves, physical facilities, financial resources, and market demand, are commonplace standards, framed in the public-utility tradition to fit the economic and physical characteristics of the natural-gas industry. The real importance of the certificate power under the Natural Gas Act lies in the fact that issues raised in proceedings pursuant to it have transcended the scope of these standards, involving no less than an attempt to redefine in the broadest terms the public interest in respect to natural gas.

It is in connection with Occam's elaborate theory of property that we can most readily grasp the importance of his theory of higher law, particularly as embodied in the jus gentium. We must, therefore, investigate this subject in considerable detail.

In Occam's view, God is originally the source of all property. But, as in the case of law and government, this is true only in the most general and indirect sense. Most property rights arise from human law and only mediately from God, although in a few special cases such rights follow directly from special divine ordination or from lex divina. Occam cites a passage from St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theol. II, II, Qu. 44, Art. 2) stating that separate possessions are not according to natural law but are founded upon human or positive law, and are added to natural law through the exercise of human reason. In the primal condition of mankind, or in the state of innocence in the Garden of Eden, all property was common and none was discrete or private. Before Eve came, Adam had only a de facto right of user and no greater right of private property than a sole remaining monk would have in the property of a monastery.

The widespread interest in understanding the political behavior of the American electorate has been served by a number of different methodological approaches. One of the most widely known and used is the analysis of aggregate voting statistics along the lines indicated by the work of Louis Bean. Major problems susceptible to study through aggregate behavioral measures include those related to the consequences of urbanization, population migration, drastic economic crisis or long-term change, or important international developments. Trends in voting behavior and regional differences in voting fall within this type of analysis, with census tract information and political sub-division voting statistics providing much of the relevant data for investigation.

A different approach to the study of political behavior is provided by the analysis of data on individuals, information pertaining to the behavior of identifiable persons. This approach allows flexibility in the ultimate units of analysis. The use of data on individuals not only provides such gross information as the percentages of people forming large groups (Democrats and Republicans, well-informed and poorly-informed) in the population, but it also provides information about various characteristics of these groups within the population.

In the preparation of the trials for “war crimes” committed during the present global conflict, students of international law will indeed recognize that a milestone in the development of legal science has been reached. As will become apparent from some of the facts to be presented in this study, we are about to see a new legal principle adopted in international relations: Impossibile est quod universitas delinquat. In consonance with various plans for general postwar reconstruction, the principle so succinctly phrased by Pope Innocent IV, in times no less perturbed than the present, is finally defeating the entrenched adherents of its counterpart, first enunciated by the skilled Bartolus of Saxeferato. Individual criminals and their accomplices are to be held responsible, not “nations” or peoples.