Wirtz Proposes Expanded Public Role

Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz last night pleaded for a concept of government and law that would allow for a fuller sense of public participation in "the decision-making process of society."

Calling this change the "most strongly felt necessity of the time," Wirtz declared that we must seek a legal and moral ethic based "less around right than around the precept of responsibility." He delivered the Law School's annual Holmes Lecture.

Wirtz turned to civil rights to prove his point. He said "more ground was gained last year than in the previous 100 years" in recognizing the Negro's rights, but that "every inch of it will be lost" if we do not face up to the responsibility of providing jobs for Negroes.

The unemployment rate among young Negroes, he emphasized, varies from 20 to 25 per cent.

"People want to be responsible for others," Wirtz said, and government and law must orient themselves to this fundamental truth. He called the Peace Corps a successful response to this desire.

Suggesting that there may be a "default" in governmental and legal leadership, the Secretary said he believed that a latent reserve of vision and affirmative responses to society's problems lay with the public.

Judiciary Gaining

"If there is a lack, it is that law and government take too little account of what people think," he said.

Wirtz noted a trend to shift decision making "from the most representative parts of government to the least representative." Key decisions, he said, have moved from local responsibility to state, and are now moving to federal jurisdiction.

The House of Representatives, he continued, is losing its dominance to the Senate, and the Congress as a whole has shifted its responsibility to the Executive.

But the judiciary, Wirtz concluded, is taking the most influential steps in America's really important problems, such as civil rights and reapportionment. "What is going on in this society that the body furthest removed from the people is doing the most innovating?"

Wirtz called for more education and better communication to help create a more publicly oriented society. He said that most of the public's information about important problems comes from a combination of 90-second news broadcasts and scanning the newspaper headlines.