It is no longer customary to the extent that it formerly was to maintain that judicial review of legislation and the consequent annulment of laws is an exclusively American political practice. With the courts of at least a score of countries passing on the validity of legislative acts, and occasionally refusing to apply them in concrete cases, the American method of guarding constitutions, characterized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a new political phenomenon, has now an extensive application among the countries operating under written fundamental laws.

Interesting developments are taking place with respect to judicial review of legislation in foreign countries. Austria and Czechoslovakia have established special constitutional courts with authority to determine whether acts are in accord with their constitutions. Germany is in the process of adopting judicial review of acts of the national government as implied in the provisions of the new constitution. According to certain jurists, French courts have taken the first steps to establish themselves as the special interpreters and guardians of the French constitution. Though the dominant opinion of French lawyers and statesmen is opposed to judicial review as a feature of the French system of government, there is a growing sentiment in favor of the acceptance of the principle, as a necessary means of rendering more effective the provisions of the constitution and of protecting individual rights as guaranteed in the Declaration of Rights. The Irish Free State has followed the lead of Canada and Australia in placing the guardianship of its new constitution in the courts. In adopting a new constitution, Chile appears to have taken preliminary steps to change a system of parliamentary supremacy to a modified régime of judicial supremacy. There is considerable public discussion in Switzerland of the possibility of accepting the principle of review of the acts of the Federal Assembly.

Politics has been referred to by a recent writer as a “great game,” which, it may be added, is played ordinarily, not in a political vacuum between a majority and an opposing minority, but rather by groups organized on an economic, social, religious, or racial basis, which coalesce with each other and fall apart only to make new combinations. This process may readily be seen if one turns the telescope on the national political firmament, but it cannot be understood in the minutias of its ceaseless activity unless the microscope be applied to relatively small localities. The state of Texas, because of its wide extent and consequent variations of social and political phenomena, presents an admirable laboratory for this microscopic method of attack. It is proposed here to apply this method to a particular political section of Texas which has recently attracted some attention.

The section referred to is that extreme southern portion of the state lying, in general, south of the Nueces River and east of Laredo, embracing thirteen counties and aggregating in area some 18,000 square miles. There are a number of reasons why it merits attention. The first and foremost is that the major element of its population is Mexican in race, but to a large extent American born. Many of these Mexican-Americans are descendants of the first settlers. It was rather the Anglo-American who was the newcomer. Obviously, therefore, the usual process of racial adjustment has been somewhat reversed. The American found the Mexican, and it was the Mexican to whom he to some extent adjusted himself.

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.

To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

The experience of Ohio with the requirement of concurrence of an extraordinary majority of the Supreme Court to declare a statute invalid is an illuminating commentary on the desirability of such a restriction. Much has been spoken and written on both sides of the question. Those who have seen laws embodying worth-while reforms invalidated by the courts, many times by bare majority decisions, have campaigned for a curtailment of the judicial prerogative. Publicists have expatiated on the evils of the situation. Textbook writers have embodied the arguments in their discussions. Teachers, it is to be feared, have quite glibly enlarged upon the necessity of unseating our “judicial obligarchy.”

The late President Theodore Roosevelt, addressing the Ohio constitutional convention in 1912, urged that body to propose an amendment providing for the recall of judicial decisions. He failed to convince the convention of the desirability of his remedy, but he succeeded in creating a feeling that something must be done; and an amendment to the judiciary article was adopted, reading as follows: “No law shall be held unconstitutional and void by the Supreme Court without the concurrence of at least all but one of the judges, except in the affirmance of a judgment of the court of appeals declaring the law unconstitutional and void.” Since the Supreme Court is composed of a chief justice and six associate justices, the restriction amounts to a requirement of the concurrence of six justices in decisions of this kind.

In Oklahoma, impeachment is of the soil racy. In the twenty-three years of statehood, thirteen impeachment messages have been received in the Senate from the House. Governor Williams (1914-18) has been the only one of six elected governors against whom House investigations were not ordered, and he may have been spared by the unusual House rule which declared any members guilty of perjury who swore to charges that were not substantiated in an investigation.

Backed by the farmer-labor group, John C. Walton was elected governor in 1922 in a campaign marked by bitterness and party bolting. Before he was inaugurated, rumor had it that he would be impeached. Opposition to him sprang from three main sources—disappointed office-seekers, the klan, and the school bloc. However, it was the klan that finally dragged him down. To prevent klan outrages and to punish their perpetrators, Walton attempted to employ the military forces of the state. Martial law was declared in the city of Tulsa on August 13, 1923. It was soon extended to the whole of Tulsa county, to Okmulgee county, and finally on September 1 to the whole state. Adding to the confusion, the legislature tried to convene itself in extraordinary session, under the excuse that the governor's action had made such a step necessary and essential to the welfare of the state. Walton countered by branding the legislators as klansmen and a meeting of the legislature as an unlawful klan assembly. An attempted convening was frustrated by armed force on September 16.

The Ferguson case in 1917 represents the only instance of the impeachment and conviction of a state official in Texas. The law of impeachment must then be sought in the proceedings of the Ferguson trial, the opinions of the attorney-general, and the opinion of the supreme court in 1924 in the case of Ferguson v. Maddox, which reviewed the legality of the 1917 proceedings in determining whether Mr. Ferguson was eligible to have his name placed on the primary election ballot as a candidate for governor.

Impeachment at a Special Session. The constitution provides that the governor may on extraordinary occasions convene the legislature in special sessions limited to thirty days' duration, during which there shall be no legislation upon subjects other than those designated in the proclamation of the governor calling the session or presented by him. The facts in the Ferguson case may be reviewed briefly. The speaker of the House of Representatives, on his own motion, had issued a call for the House to meet in special session on August 1, 1917, to consider the impeachment of the governor. Before the members could assemble, the governor issued a call for a special session of the legislature to meet at the same time as that set by the speaker's call for the purpose of considering the matter of university appropriations. The House proceeded with the investigation and impeached the governor, who was thereupon suspended from office.

State courts determine, in the absence of constitutional provision to the contrary, whether amendments to state constitutions have been proposed and adopted in the manner provided for these constitutions. Not every minor deviation from the course of action marked out in the constitution for its amendment is deemed sufficient to justify the court in declaring that the amendment has been “unconstitutionally adopted,” but whether these deviations are serious enough to warrant such a declaration is a question to be determined by the courts themselves. Statutes supplementing constitutional provisions on the subject of amendment are valid if not in conflict with the constitutional provisions themselves, and substantial compliance with these rules is also required by the courts. Sometimes the provisions regulating the subject of publication of proposed amendments are constitutional; at other times they are statutory. In either case, publication in the manner provided for, and for the period of time provided for, is necessary to the validity of the amendment. Publication for two weeks, when the period should have been four weeks, was deemed sufficient by the Nebraska court to invalidate the amendment involved.