Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...relaxed. After ten days of bear-pit tension, the testimony of ex-Communist-Courier Whittaker Chambers and his wife was finally complete. Hulking, flat-voiced Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy hoisted himself into a sitting position on a corner of the Government table and began a careful job of legal bricklaying-matching the "pumpkin papers" and other secret documents with the originals from which they had been copied...
They were at the tag end of the term. Next week the court hopes to hang up its tailored black robes and go fishing, putter around its roses, and occasionally study legal papers. Behind them the Nine will leave some bewildered citizens, some disgruntled federal cops, a larger than usual number of baffled and unhappy lawyers, and one of the most adventurous records in the Supreme Court's long and loquacious history...
...expect reasonable men to think of participation in open and legal meetings on public subjects as the equivalent of secret plotting to commit crime, merely because Communists or "fellow travelers" take part in such meetings. On this line of reasoning, literally thousands of reputable citizens would have offended. By no possibility could Harvard adopt a view which, to put it mildly, is so extreme. To do so would, I believe, call for conclusions which offend common sense and for efforts at repression that would be out of place anywhere in our country and are inconceivable at Harvard...
Nothing of this character will happen under Mr. Conant. There will be no harassment of professors for engaging in open and legal meetings. There will be no apparatus of inquiry and "closer watch." The harm done by the effort necessary to discover even a single clan-destine Party Member would outweigh any possible benefit. To go beyond that by searching for "reasonable grounds" concerning "loyalty," would still more disrupt Harvard or any free university...
Concluded MacArthur: "For the Soviets to speak of democratic rights, suppression of legal activities, arbitrariness and chastisement is enough to challenge the late lamented [Robert] Ripley at his imagination's best, and leads one to conclude that now there must really be nothing new under...