ABSTRACT
Charles S. Rhyne (1912–2003) was a Special Counsel to President Eisenhower and proposed that he establish May 1st as Law Day USA. 1 Eisenhower liked the idea and assigned his speechwriter, Executive Assistant Arthur Larson, to draft a speech for a May 1, 1958, Law Day Proclamation. Larson, the former Dean of the University of Pittsburgh Law School, researched the topic of world peace under law, reading several books suggested by Charles Rhyne. 2 Although a major theme of the Law Day speech was a comparison of America’s freedoms under the law with the Soviet Union’s militaristic May Day exercises, the heart of this first Law Day speech was this passage: “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.” 3
