Law and Atomic Energy

AMONG its other contributions to society, the legal system furnishes, as well as it may, the necessary rules, principles, and standards to guide and regulate the activities of mankind, to the end that people may live together in relative peace and harmony, and may carry ontheir everyday activities without unduly impinging on the rights and privileges of others. However, the technological developments of these recent science-dominated years have created severe stresses in the legal system by increasing enormously the interdependence of mankind, thereby requiring infinitely more complicated legal controls to keep in good order the progressively more complex social and economic system. And then by way of climax, the year of our Lord 1945 projected into an already complex society atomic chain fission, and, as time goes on, this, together with the possibilities of the atomic bomb, will further increase the stresses in the legal system. It is not too much to say that no one yet knows whether a democratic legal system can survive these stresses. We earnestly hope it can. My purpose in this article is to report upon some of the legal implications of modern science, and, since atomic fission not only illustrates the effect of modern science on law as a social institution, but has the further advantage of being dramatic and timely, I shall use its impact on the legal system as the concrete example to buttress my general conclusions

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