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level at which a decision “could be had.” In 1960 the Court reviewed a judgment of the Police Court of Louisville, Kentucky, imposing two ten-dollar fineson one Sam Thompson. “Shuffling Sam,” as the newspapers called him, had been convicted of loitering and disorderly conduct after the police found him shuffling in a café. Under Kentucky law, fines under twenty dollars could not be appealed to any state court, so Sam Thompson’s lawyer went directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. There the convictions were found unconstitutional—in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process guarantee—because there was absolutely no evidence to support them.
    A person with a federal claim on which he may eventually want the Supreme Court to pass must raise that claim at the earliest possible moment in a state court proceeding. The Supreme Court, again in deference to the states, will not consider federal issues injected into a lawsuit as an afterthought or as a desperate measure by someone defeated on the battlefield of state law. But if a state appellate court agrees to hear, and actually decides, a federal claim raised late, then the state has in effect waived any objection to tardiness and the rule does not apply.
    Finally, among these requirements designed to pay proper respect to state judicial systems, there is the rule that the person with a federal claim must follow procedures generally applicable in the state courts. If he filed his state appeal two weeks after the deadline and the state supreme court threw his case out for that reason, it does not matter how compelling his basic argument on federal law may be; the Supreme Court will not hear it. Once more there is a logical exception to the rule: If a state court applies its procedural requirements in a way that discriminates against parties claiming federal rights, an alleged procedural flaw will not be permitted to bar review in the Supreme Court. The Alabama Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the ground that the N.A.A.C.P. had used the wrong form of writ. But the United States Supreme Court found that the Alabama judges had never applied such a rule before and had evidently devised it just for the N.A.A.C.P.; the Court put aside the Alabama findings and took jurisdiction of the case. State courts, said Justice Holmes in 1924, may not in their procedural rulings set “springes” for federal rights.
    When someone asserts that an action of government, state or federal, violates the Constitution, he faces further barriers to Supreme Court review. These have been erected over the years by the Court itself, out of a recognition that it is a grave step to invoke the Constitution against government officials—one not to be taken lightly—and that the Court has occasionally got itself into deep difficulty by venturing too hastily into constitutional decisions. Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case, holding that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in new territories, brought the severest criticism on the Court and hurt its reputation for years; Chief Justice Hughes called it a “self-inflicted wound” because the issue need not have been decided at all.
    “The most important thing we do is not doing,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis used to say, expressing his almost Puritan resistance to the temptation of making great constitutional decisions. It is to avoid premature or unnecessary invocation of the Constitution that the Court has developed rules of self-control—“for its own governance,” Justice Brandeis said, adding that under these precepts the Court had “avoided passing upon a large part of all the constitutional questions pressed upon it for decision.”
    One concept, found in the law generally but applied withspecial care by the Supreme Court in constitutional cases, is “standing.” This means that the party complaining of some action in a