Opinion ID: 1087888
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: establishment of political views.

Text: The suggestion that a state-created Integrated Bar amounts to a governmental establishment of political belief is hardly worthy of more serious consideration. Even those who would treat the Fourteenth Amendment as embracing the identical protections afforded by the First would have to recognize the clear distinction in the wording of the First Amendment between the protections of speech and religion, only the latter providing a protection against establishment. And as to the Fourteenth, viewed independently of the First, one can surely agree that a State could not create a fund to be used in helping certain political parties or groups favored by it to elect their candidates or promote their controversial causes ( ante, p. 788), any more than could Congress do so, without agreeing that this is in any way analogous to what Wisconsin has done in creating its Integrated Bar, or to what Congress has provided in the Railway Labor Act, considered in the Street case, ante, p. 740. In establishing the Integrated Bar Wisconsin has, I assume all would agree, shown no interest at all in favoring particular candidates for judicial or legal office or particular types of legislation. Even if Wisconsin had such an interest, the Integrated Bar does not provide a fixed, predictable conduit for governmental encouragement of particular views, for the Bar makes its own decisions on legislative recommendations and appears to take no action at all with regard to candidates. By the same token the weight lent to one side of a controversial issue by the prestige of government is wholly lacking here. In short, it seems to me fanciful in the extreme to find in the limited functions of the Wisconsin State Bar those risks of governmental self-perpetuation that might justify the recognition of a Constitutional protection against the establishment of political beliefs. A contrary conclusion would, it seems to me, as well embrace within its rationale the operations of the Judicial Conference of the United States, and the legislative recommendations of independent agencies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Bureau of the Budget.