Law Students Pack Hall for Fraenkel Talk

Osmond K. Fraenkel '08, vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild, delivered his scheduled lecture on "Searches and Seizure" to a capacity audience of Law students in Langdell Hall yesterday. Fraenkel said, after the lecture, that he "was glad" efforts to suppress his talk had not succeeded, because he had "enjoyed himself very much."

Fraenkel made no allusion during his lecture to the attempt to ban his talk by Samuel P. Sears '17, president of the Massachusetts Bar Association. Dean Griswold refused to uphold Searr earlier this week.

Fraenkel lectured on the "unreasonable searches and seizure" clause of the Constitution. During the question period which followed his talk, he "guessed" that the Supreme Court would reverse the conviction of the 11 Communists found guilty of conspiring against the government. The Smith Act, under which they were convicted, will be upheld, he conjectured.

"Old Conservative Cry"

Interviewed after his talk, Fraenkel commented on Sears' contention, made in a letter to Griswold, that the University should not be a sounding board for anything which isn't "100 percent American."

"That," Griswold said, "is an old, old conservative cry raised by people who don't want youth to be taught how to think," and one to which "sensible universities pay no attention."

The Harvard Lawyers Guild, which sponsored the talk, distributed literature before the lecture replying to Sears' charges. Sears demanded the suppression of the guild on the grounds that the House Un-American Activities Committee had called it "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party."

In a meeting which preceded the lecture, the Law School Committee of the Young Republican Club adopted a resolution endorsing "the published position of Dean Erwin N. Griswold in defense of fundamental freedoms basic to the legal and political life of our state and nation."