Holmes Lecture

A LARGE Spaulding Auditorium audience last month heard Federal Judge Henry J. Friendly recommend that Congress initiate legislation on which the U.S. Supreme Court can render guideline opinions to clarify the status of private institutions receiving public funds. Principles of the 1819 Dartmouth College Case which upheld the inviolability of contracts and charters still apply in constitutional law, he said, but "the line is more blurred and the problems harder in 1968 than when Daniel Webster addressed it 150 years ago."

The distinguished jurist's lecture was the first Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture to be delivered at a New England college or university and opened observances of the Dartmouth College Case Sesquicentennial.

Judge Friendly said clarification of how the federal government can control private institutions "lies in contract, in regulations, in legislation, rather than in recourse to the Constitution, too blunt and powerful an instrument for the myriad diversities" of contemporary America, and cited the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an example of the "superiority of legislative solutions." He termed "much too expansive" the principle that all Fourteenth Amendment guarantees apply to all institutions serving "public purpose."

The address will be published but details are not yet known and will be given in a later issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE.