"Placing American ships under the flag of Panama is perfectly legal, but immoral, unethical, and unfair. It renders laughable our efforts at neutrality," Payson S. Wild, Jr., associate professor of Government, said yesterday.

In an interview, the authority on international law described the recent move by American shipping firms as "hypocrisy," and said, "It constitutes a direct challenge to the Germans to get these ships, and is playing with just the kind of dangerous incident we have been trying to avoid."

If Germany tried a similar scheme, we'd all be angry," he added.

Not Idea of Legislators

The wholesale transfers which began last week are not in accord with the intention of those who wrote and voted for the recent neutrality legislation, Wild believes, since Congress intended that no American ships should carry goods to belligerents, regardless of what flag they were flying.

While American shipping concerns do not all have subsidiary organizations in other countries, any firm could set up a temporary "dummy" corporation in a Central or South American nation, and thus make a shift of registration a mere formality, he pointed out.