summonses to musicians (unless they are found to be blocking an entrance or interfering with train operations-rare instances. both). and said it would rewrite its regulations

"It was the best possible victory." Carew-Reid says "I was almost developing a hate-cop mentality. Now I feel pleased when I see one come up. Sometimes they say. That was nice."

One recent drizzly morning. a lot of people expressed similar sentiments "God bless you." a woman said in a note she dropped into the musician's guitar case, along with a dollar. "Lovely." said others. "Just beautiful." At the end of the day. the guitarist pockets between $40 and $60. his normal take. Then he returns to the fleabag he calls home. takes up his duties as president of the tenants association and works for better housing conditions. "This is America, isn't it? People don't have to live in squalor."

A year ago this spring Cat Nguyen was 16. an honors student at West Jefferson High School, just across the Mississip pi River from New Orleans, and an editor of a soon-to-be mimeographed school paper called Your Side. Five years before that she had reached this country from Viet Nam. with no command of English. Having come so far so quickly. she thought the world was at her feet-until Principal Eldon Orgeron saw the paper and banned it.

He had not been consulted. Orgeron said: what was more. he seemed to read the paper's tone as seditious. Nguyen went to the American Civil Liberties Union. "I had to do it to prove can fight for my rights and to show

other kids they can fight for theirs.

Nguyen is one of those wunderkinds who inspire pride, envy or hoth Her mother came from Saigon to New Orleans in 1980 to be near a brother. Cat soon followed. Her mother got a job teaching elementary school and rented a long. skinny house-a shotgun househard by the levee in the little town of Gretna. Cal conquered English. became an honors student and grew to a height of 4 ft. 9 in She also got an after-school job in a grocery, where she has to stand on a case of heer to reach the cash register.

L

ast year. as part of a class project on freedom of the press. she and her friend Regina Saenz and a couple of casual contributors put out their 14-page mimeographed paper. They thought they were being ironic. funny, irreverent. They included references to unresponsive counselors. the selling of term papers. sex. drugs. cheating. "Don't try to cheat unless you're really sneaky. have years of experience and sit way in the back of the class." they wrote in a parody of an advice column. To a would-be dropout, they preached. "Just stay home. get a job at some gas station. get married. have a couple of kids. and before you know it. you'll be 70."

"This was not responsible journalism." said Orgeron. "This school does not extol those kinds of things. That's why this paper has to stor The principal seized the last 30 of the 150 copies Cat had run off. She had sold the rest at 50c a pop. The young woman likes to tell her own story:

I used to be a waitress in a restau

rant, and I knew some lawyers, and they told me to call the American Civil Liberties Union. For a week they didn't accept me. They thought I was just some student mad at my principal. When they did accept me. the A.C.LU. contacted the school and threatened to take it to court. The school board's lawyers settled out of court I got the right to print more issues, but I couldn't sell it We had no money. How could I print without selling?

"I could not sue without parental approval because I'm underage, and my mother works for the school board and she wouldn't sign If I had my way. I would have taken it all the way. At the end of the school year I decided to publish another issue. Since I couldn't sell it. it came mostly out of my pocket. I just wanted to prove my rights. It made the teachers mad. The principal said he decided not to censor it-with the lawyers and everything he didn't have the right-but he just wanted to sound tough."

What dispirited her about the ordeal. the student says was the apathy of the student body. "I wanted a paper for the majority, the D students. The minority. the A students. have their own paper. the official paper, the Jolly Roger. But when my paper came out. the minority was against me and the majority couldn't have cared less I wanted to be a lawyer and change the world. But when I saw the minority wasn't with you and the majority didn't care. it looked to me just like politics. I have decided to become a doctor and help people whether they want it or not. I don't want to have anything to do with politics."

Cat Nguyen was graduated from

West Jefferson High last month with perfect scores and a four-year Martin Luther King Scholarship to Brandeis University. where she will start the long road toward becoming a physician.

he dictum that for every wrong there is a right is not true reality. There are a lot of people out there who have been wounded. with no remedy." This is Ed Lawson talking, and can he talk. It is a stunning San Francisco dawn. and Lawson has rejected an invitation to breakfast. "I do not like to do two pleasurabie things at once. converse and eat. I find one gets in the way of the other. We'll find someplace outdoors to languish." In moments he secures a public bench not far from Union Square. and occupies it with a self-assurance that all but says aloud. "I am a taxpayer. This is mine"

Lawson ran into trouble in San Diego. where, as an "avid pedestrian." he was stopped repeatedly for vagrancy on his midnight walks. proseculed twice and convicted once under a provision of the state's penal code that required him to produce "credible and reliable" identification for any police officer who had reason to be suspicious. Lawson saw the matter simply: he was black, his looks were not conventional. and he was treading white sidewalks. His suit called the law unconstitutionally vague and said it violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and the Fifth

Amendment's self-incrimination proteLion The US Supreme Court did not subscribe all the way with Lawson, but it did agree that the statute was too vague to sallisfy the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. Today Ed Lawson's nightly constitutionals are nobody's business

"I took a terrible beating for years Lawson says. drinking in the day. "Somewhere back in here is Melvin Belli's office." He sweeps an arm round San Francisco "I sat there. He said. No remedy No money in it. I went to the best-known attorneys, the highest priced. They said by and large you don't win against the police department. They didn't understand that I knew I could beat them on my own turf. the media Most people who can communicate, communicate. Those who can't carry guns I thought surety at some point sanity would prevail But they would not give up, and so it went all the way to the Supreme Court."

In May 1983. the night the Supreme

Court struck down the California statute that the San Diego police had used to nail Lawson for vagrancy. Lawson, who was called the California Walkman in head- i Ime shorthand was all over the networks. Sauimtering as the news programs had it wherever he pleased He said at the time. If you are one of those individuals who. over coffee and the morning paper say This is terrible Somebody ought to de something about this, you will probably see the person who should do something when you look in the mirror to shave

To this day he keeps his principles handy, as you would a wallet Born 41 years agom Buffalo, he remembers blacks Tapping in the streets in a time before they were called raps "They were always say. They won t let me do this My fresquent comment would be. Who are they! Much of my life has been uncovering that! paling mixin.

Somewhere along the line. Lawson. an odd duck by any measure. got press Smart He knew he was photogenic. he knew he was bright, and he knew his i cause was night Innocent black man arrested for taking a hike' It was a natural The notoriety his case received has led to his involvement in other "meaningful baltles." as he calls them.

Lawson makes a living in an illdefined sort of way "I'm neither a butcher. a baker nor a candlestick maker. I do joint ventures with the entertainment industry. I'm a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I wrote a screenplay. I've got a horrendous project involving the integration of entertainment with education. You want to call me a consultant? Will your stomach settle? Okay, I'm a consultant. But really I do whatever the Sam Hill I want to." Lately he has been involved in something called Pro Per Inc.. which is "attempting to de-lawyer and repeople the American count system by encouraging Americans to represent themselves in court." And there is something Lawson calls the "Unauthorized Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution." He is publishing a biweekly pamphlet called Common Cents, which encourages the common man to

celebrate his favorite part of the Constitution in his own way, as opposed to what Lawson sees as a while. snobbish celebration along the Potomac.

"The measure of an advanced civilization is how it treats its worst people, not its best," he says. rising from his bench. "Those who have the most reason to celebrate a Constitution are the poorest. The people in the BART Bay Area Rapid Transit! station That gentleman asleep on that bench over there." Then Lawson strides away. a man with a purpose. -By Gregory Jaynes

of Bork

WASHINGTON, July 25 — Fourteen years after the immense drama of what many at the time called a "Saturday Night Massacre," the handling of that constitutional crisis amid the Watergate scandals is emerging as an issue that could shape the emotional constitutional questions of today.

That is because the man in the middie on the night of Oct. 20, 1973, Robert H-Bork, is now President Reagan's nominee to fill a critical swing scat un the Supreme Court. Whoever fills that seat may have the power to change national pohey on issues ranging from Face relations to abortion.

As the Senate ponders the way Judge Hork handled that carher role, among other issues in the confirmation battle To come, it is likely to find that his consuming interest was not protecting President Nixon's weakening grip un office, as some foes charged immediately, or protecting the Justice Depart ment from chaos, as he has suggested, nor any of the larger issues of the day. Instead, Judge Bork was apprently preoccupied with point of law: whether Archibald Cox, who as Watergate special prosecutor was ostensibly a Justice Department official, had a legal right to mount a court challenge against the President; and whether the President had the legal authority to dismiss him for doing so.

Underlying the struggle were fundamental questions of governance: Did the special prosecutor have the right to subpoena the President's secret tapes? Did the special prosecutor have authority to challenge a President? Would Elhot L Richardson, whose own confirmation as Attorney General was achieved by the promise to appoint Mr. Cox, discharge his old law professor at

would someone else? And finally, was Mr. Nixon trying to hide his complicity in the coverup of the break-in to Democratic National Committee headquarlers by burglars linked to the White House?

Mr. Richardson and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, refused to obey White House orders, and quit or were fired. Mr. Bork, who had begun that fateful Saturday as Solicitor General, the third-ranking officer in the Justice Department, went along.

Judge Bork has said he dismissed Mr. Cux in order to hold the Justice De partment together by sparing it from a long succession of resignations and tu continue the Watergate investigation at a time when the alternative may have been chaos.

But what other participants in the episode remember about Mr. Burk's performance is what they describe as lus single-minded, almost obsessive concern about an issue of legal proceJure, rather than the substance of Mr. Cox's investigation of the President.

Character Flaws Seen
In Legalistic Outlook

Memories of the affair have faded somewhat since that night, but Judge Bork's critics maintain that this episode reveals character flaws that go beyond their objections to his views on specific issues.

It is what they allege is a narrowness of vision and reverence for executive authority, as much as his dismissal of Mr. Cox, that these critics say makes him unsuitable for the Supreme Court.

But Judge Bork's defenders, including some who believe he should not