Freund Speaks At Leverett On 3 Justices

Paul A. Freund, Loeb University Professor, constitutional lawyer, and legal historian last night offered 20 people at a Leverett House American Studies Table anecdotal descriptions of the Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter and Louis D. Brandeis.

Freund portrayed Holmes as a "skeptical" and "pragmatic" person who nevertheless tolerated the flaws he saw in the law-making process. Holmes was "pre-Existential," Freund said, in his conception of living as "not belief in a cause but giving one's self to a cause which one only dimly perceives."

Freund then spoke of Brandeis, for whom he clerked after graduating from the Law School in 1932. Brandeis was a "moralist," Freund said, who "wrote opinions not to pierce the mind, but to instruct and overwhelm" with their weight.

"He had an extraordinary faith in reason," Freund said, "some might say a pathetic faith in reason." But Brandeis was not sentimental, Freund said, adding, "He could be quite tough-minded."

Brandeis was fond of working early in the morning, Freund said, and he told of one clerk who, after working all night on a legal memo, slipped it under the door of Brandeis's apartment and felt Brandeis receive it. Brandeis was 75 at the time.

Then Freund discussed Frankfurter, who supervised Freund's work at the Law School for his two law degrees. Freund said Frankfurter was then thought of as "controversial," but was "not so different from men you might find today at the Law School," in that Frankfurter had come there from government, rather than private practice.

"The idea that he was a radical was quite mistaken," Freund said. "Actually, he was quite conservative. He was concerned with the quality of justice. He worshipped everything English, most of all the English legal system."

When asked about recent conservative opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court, Freund, who is editing an eight-volume history of the Court, said conservative trends have been confined to questions of criminal procedure. On civil rights and freedom of speech, Freund said, "I think the mainstream of the Warren Court will run on."

Freund currently teaches no undergraduate courses. In previous years, Freund taught Soc Sci 137, "The Legal Process," which had an enrollment of over 800.

"It must have been the most roaring gut," Freund said.