Word: ervin
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Linguistic Abomination. Ervin has been a wide-eyed lover of law ever since his childhood in Morganton, N.C. (pop. 13,000). As a boy, he hung around the Burke County courthouse watching his lawyer father argue cases dressed in Victorian cutaway tails. After graduating from Harvard Law School ('22), Ervin married his home-town sweetheart, joined his father's law firm, and polished his oratory as a young state legislator. He once quashed a bill that would have outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools with the objection that "such a resolution serves no good purpose except...
Appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1948, Judge Ervin rarely missed a chance to write expansive opinions. After a complex appeal contesting an ambiguous will, he blasted the lower-court judge for having "murdered the king's, queen's and everybody else's English by using the monstrous linguistic abomination and/or." Pondering conflicting testimony in a manslaughter case, Ervin suggested that truth often comes to the biased witness as "the image of a rod to the beholder through the water-bent and distorted." North Carolina lawyers still quote Ervin's opinions because, says...
...freshman U.S. Senator in 1954, Ervin thrust himself onto the front pages with a folksy anecdote underlining his contempt for his Communist-hunting Wisconsin colleague Joe McCarthy. According to Ervin, Uncle Ephraim Swink, a sick, arthritic mountaineer, was called upon to testify to his religious experiences at a revival meeting. Uncle Ephraim remained silent. Finally the minister said, "Brother Swink, suppose you tell us what God has done for you." Uncle Ephraim pulled his crippled body from his seat and replied, "Brother, he has mighty nigh ruint me." Said Ervin: "Mr. President, that is about what Senator McCarthy has done...
Fear v. Freedom. Now considered the Senate's ranking constitutional expert, Ervin is aghast that proliferating Government data banks are being fed undigested information on merely "potential" lawbreakers. Last week Ervin heard evidence that assorted public and private agencies now keep ten to 20 dossiers on virtually every American. The dossiers often stress political activities, sexual behavior and credit records, and invite misuse by officials as well as employers...
...Ervin sees it, a free country must take the risk that "a man who has never committed a crime may some day commit one." Lacking probable cause for surveillance, he argues, the Government has no right to secretly record anyone's attitudes toward politics, sex or religion. Ervin hopes that his hearings will lead to federal privacy legislation giving Americans a new right to know what information is being kept about them, and to rebut inaccurate data. If such a right is established, Ervin believes that a new federal agency may be needed to enforce it. In any case...