but we are going through what was gone through in England for a good many years during the development of the administrative agencies and the issuance of Executive rules and orders. There was no official publication of the rules and orders and finally, in the Nineties, as Dr. Griswold will more accurately tell you, it came to be recognized as a public necessity in England to have the rules and regulations and executive orders regularly published; and we reached that situation in this country a long while ago, and we ought to have published our orders, our rules, and our regulations.

I do not think that is a fair test of the need for it, that the Congressmen do not receive frequent requests for them because, ordinarily, the members of the bar and business men do not consult Congressmen to find out what the statutes or regulations or orders are; they try to consult official publications; neither is the fact that pamphlets can be obtained upon application to various agencies, such as the N. R. A., or Pure Food Administration, or the Treasury Department, conclusive upon the subject.

The important thing is that the public, not merely lawyers but the general public, is entitled to the situation where it will be the duty of the Government, or some agency of the Government, to publish officially the orders and regulations which constitute law, and which amend law, and which change law, in order that the public will have a right to get, and have a dependable place to get such regulations.

Now, it seems to me that it does not do a lawyer or his client any good to go and get a pamphlet from the Recovery Administration, or the Petroleum Administration, because the pamphlet is not indexed to the previous pamphlet, and is not indexed to the statute, so it is not of any particular use.

When I left my chambers this morning to come over here, I asked my secretary to bring me the Executive orders which she has collected for me since I have been in Washington-since May 1933. She commenced collecting them in March, I think, and I estimate, roughly, that there were 1,200 of them. They are of very little use to me, unless I have my secretary or clerk build a permanent index, because one will affect another, and one will repeal another, some will be related to one subject, and some will be related to another subject, so they will have no particular value.

The fact of the matter is that, admittedly, a tremendous amount of Government activity today, affecting private persons and affecting the public, and affecting corporations, in both criminal and civil aspects, is governed by regulations and rules and orders. It is a familiar fact to all lawyers that a statute frequently goes into effect, or seems to have been effected, dependent upon the issuance of regulations. That is familiar to all lawyers and to many members of the public, that a very large number of our public statutes go into effect through interpretative regulations; and it is idle to attempt to know what the law is today, without knowing what the regulations are or the Executive orders, rules and regulations; and I, as a lawyer and a judge, say that we have no dependable source for obtaining those laws and regulations at the present time.

If I may refer to an unhappy experience that I had before the United States Supreme Court, since you spoke of it, here is the situation in that case: There were two cases before the United States Supreme Court at that time, the Smith case, which was a criminal.

case, and the Panama Refining case, which was a civil case. At that time, I was Assistant Attorney General with the Antitrust Division, in charge of that litigation. It had been handled in the lower court by a lawyer in Petroleum Administration, through a relationship which existed at that time.

By a defective order, a defective Executive order-I say defective, in the sense that it transferred-I mean, it accomplished an amendment not intended, and in September of 1933 that had been stripped from the oil code. The only feature of it that made any material difference, referred to producing oil above a particular quota. There was not known even to the members of the Petroleum Administration, according to their assertion, until a long while after it took place. They did not even realize the effect of the order, itself, and it never came to the attention of the Department of Justice until the summer of 1934, when that litigation first reached our immediate responsibility, and then we found it only through the diligent search of a member of my staff, who insisted upon seeing either the original Executive order or the photostats that are in the possession of the Petroleum Administration. He never did get to see, as I remember, the original of that order. He finally got a photostatic copy of the order. It never had been filed at the State Department, and although upon suggestion to the Petroleum Administration that it ought to be filed in the State Department, it was not filed there until December 1933, which was after the argument of the cil cases.

We felt it our duty, in the Department of Justice, as soon as we found the code was defective under which these cases had been brought, to dismiss the criminal case, and we felt that it was our responsibility to call the attention of the Supreme Court to the defect in this order.

Now, my friend Congressman Cochran says that all I would have to do in the Supreme Court, when the Chief Justice and the other justices asked me why I had not found this order, was to go and ask a question go and get it. We had tried for weeks to get it. That is a spectacular illustration, nevertheless, of the underlying principle that I am here to speak about, and that is, that no such situation should be permitted by law to exist.

There should be as much regularity and authenticity and dependability in the sense of accurate references from one regulation to another, and the statutes relating thereto, relating to the Executive orders, regulations, and rules, as with respect to the statutes at large; and I think it is a matter of extreme public importance, I do not care what the expense is, so that the public of this country and the lawyers shall be able to find the law accurately, dependably and promptly, so far as the Federal Government is concerned.

I do not see, as a matter of economy, why it should not be a very simple proceeding and a very inexpensive proceeding to get out the Register, because, one it gets going and an orderly compilation of these regulations and Executive orders has been made, there need be no publication of them by the Government in the other bureaus; and so far as subscription is concerned, I think it is safe to predict that the vast majority of lawyers of this country will subscribe to the Federal Register. How otherwise they will get an opportunity to properly represent their clients I do not know.

I repeat my interest here is, in a sense, personal, because of my experience in the Supreme Court, and also by my official experience. I think it is highly important, from a judicial standpoint and the standpoint of the Department of Justice, that we should have this

act.

Mr. CELLER. Thank you very much, Judge. Assistant Attorney General Dickinson is with us, and I am sure would like to say something on the subject. He, too, is disinterested, Mr. Cochran, as far as employees are concerned.

STATEMENT OF JOHN DICKINSON, ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL

Mr. DICKINSON. Mr. Chairman, as I listened to Mr. Cochran's remarks, my mind went back to a time 100 years ago when, if a man wanted to read the decisions of the courts of last resort in his jurisdiction, he had to subscribe to what amounted to a service of private reporters, who printed such of those decisions as they thought the people might be interested in.

If you go back to the same period or earlier, you will find that the statutes of many of our own States, during the colonial period, before they became States, were available only in the form of compilations of private individuals who got them together and sold them to the lawyers.

We have gotten away from that. We have gotten to the point where we feel it is a public responsibility and the Government's responsibility to make available to the bench and bar and private citizens of the country sources from which they can read what the law is. We do not leave that to private enterprise any longer, because we feel it is a public duty; and we feel it is a public duty because we feel it is the only effective way of disseminating information that the private citizen is entitled to have.

Now, it is perfectly true that, by belonging to some of the associations to which Mr. Cochran referred, to get a good deal of the information that he has in mind. However, there are a good many business people in this country that do not belong to those associations. There are a great many business people that are not large enough to maintain the contacts in their own organizations that is necessary to supply them with this essential information as to the law. I do not feel that an individual who is not in position to maintain those contacts ought to be any the less able to find the law applicable to him, that the individual who does belong to organizations of that kind.

I am thinking about the lawyer out through the country, the lawyer in the small country town who has a case that involves tracing down of the law frequently through those rules and regulations. I think they ought to be available in the country courthouses throughout this country, compiled and currently issued, these rules and regulations of the Federal Government, in the same way that there are available sets of United States Statutes at Large, and sets of the Supreme Court and Federal Reporters.

I am thinking about the man who only occasionally comes into contact with these rules and regulations, the lawyer who only occasionally comes into contact with them, but to whom they are very vital when he does come in contact with them.

Mr. Cochran referred to the complications that are issued by the different bureaus, themselves. That is simply another instance of the feeling that there is a responsibility upon the Government to make this material available to the people who are bound by it. It seems to me that that is an argument in favor of the Register, rather than an argument against it, because the publication now is necessary, as is illustrated by the compilations that are issued by the various bureaus and departments.

As Judge Stephens says, these things are gotten together frequently without any reference to what went before, without any cross-index, without any reference to the statutes. There is one other thought that I would like to leave here before I finish, and that is, as Judge Stephens indicated, that this is not a matter of the N. R. A., it is not a matter of an emergency agency, but it is a matter which reaches deeply into the structure of many of the well-established, longestablished departments of the Government, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Bureau of Animal Industry, the Bureau of Fisheries, the Federal Trade Commission, and other organizations of the Government, through which our experience has shown us that we have to act, in order to get an effective administration of the laws.

This is a period in which we hear a great deal about bureaucracy, and the charges that are brought against bureaucracy are generally applicable to many of these old-established agencies of the Government that none of us would like to see abolished; they are charges and serious charges of the inability to find out what the law is, charges of unfairness to certain individual departments. We have got to correct that. Certainly none of us would like to see this regulatory system of government stripped down, as it would have to be stripped down, if we got rid of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission. But if we are not going to succumb to that charge of bureaucracy, if we are going to go forward with our government, our job is to see that the abuses on which the charge of bureaucracy is based, are eliminated.

One of those abuses is the difficulty of the ordinary lawyer, or the ordinary citizen, to find out what the law is.

I should think there would be a great many Members of Congress who, however anxious they are to serve their constituents, would be delighted to be relieved of some of the worry and trouble which comes from having to rake up the law for their constituents out through the country, instead of making it possible for those people to have a lawyer go around to the courthouse and look at some official source to find out what the law is that is applicable to the case at hand.

Mr. MICHENER. I might say that I represent the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I am familiar with what the professor says, and if you had to do what I have to do in this connection, you would appreciate the necessity of something of this kind, because there is not a day that we do not have in my office requests from the schools of economics and school of forestry for all of those rules and regulations affecting the grazing of land, and every conceivable thing, and the only way they can get it is to get it through a Congressman. Mr. DICKINSON. Yes.

Judge STEPHENS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to make another remark.

Mr. RAMSEY. I think your idea of economy has got the best of you. Mr. COCHRAN. What is that?

Mr. RAMSEY. I think your idea of economy has got the best of you-you and Blanton.

Mr. COCHRAN. How about your idea when you came before the Accounts Committee and wanted to put the United States Supreme Court Reports in the office of every Congressman? It only costs about $260,000 to start these supplements yearly.

Mr. RAMSEY. I think that is absolutely necessary.

(Here followed discussion off the record.)

Mr. CELLER. Judge Stephens.

Judge STEPHENS. I would like to add just one other thing to my remarks: For the entertainment of the gentlemen assembled, and also to strike home one further point, at the time I argued this case before the United States Supreme Court I was confronted by a lawyer from Texas, who was defending his client in this Panama oil case. He was a very effective country lawyer, who was trying to make good the act, and he pulled out of his pocket, during the course of his argument in the Supreme Court, a bedraggled, lop-eared old copy of the Petroleum Regulations published by the Petroleum Administration, and he waved that in the eyes of the Supreme Court and said, "There, Your Honor, is the law that I had to consult to defend my client's rights." He was correct. That is all he could get, one of these pamphlets that Congressman Cochran has spoken about, and that pamphlet, published by the Petroleum Administration, had printed the code as if it were the correct code, but had not put in it the order or the effect of the order which eliminated the effective provision in it.

Mr. CELLER. Professor Griswold is here, and I want to say that Professor Griswold wrote a very illuminating article in the Harvard Law Review about a year ago, and my reading of it caused me to file the bill in question, which is the Federal Register bill. Professor Griswold has come from Harvard at his own expense, and I am sure we will appreciate whatever Professor Griswold may tell us this morning.

STATEMENT OF PROF. ERWIN N. GRISWOLD, OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Professor GRISWOLD. I think Judge Stephens covered the ground very thoroughly. In the first place, I want to state that I do not represent anybody and have no interest in this proposition, except as an American citizen, incidentally, who, at one time, was employed by the Government, and whose interest in the matter arose when he was employed by the Government.

For 5 years I was in the Department of Justice. As you can see that time began before there were any N. R. A. or A. A. A. or any of those things, and my knowledge that there was a need for such a thing as this arose long before those unusual statutes came into being.

As a matter of fact, as I recall it, I think it went back to a day in 1930, when I was assigned to prepare a draft of an opinion of the Attorney General in response to an inquiry from the Secretary of the Treasury about two poor school teachers out in Illinois, who had endorsed some Liberty bonds in blank, to send them in for redemption, and after they had been endorsed in blank, they were stolen; and the