State Supreme Court Turns Down University Foes on Arboretum Shift

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court yesterday ruled against the petitioners of the Association for the Arnold Arboretum, a group attempting to challenge Harvard's right to move parts of the Arboretum collection here.

The decision, handed down by Chief Justice Stanley E. Qua, affirmed that the court has no right to review the decisions of the Attorney-General, thus ceasing the Arboretum Association's bid to overrule Attorney-General George Fingold's 1953 decision favoring the University.

As public trustee of the world-famed arboretum, herbarium, and library in Jamaica Plain, the University decided in January, 1953, to move parts of the institution's collections to the new Herbarium building in Cambridge in order to promote productive research and to provide safer facilities for specimens.

Last summer, the University transferred the least useful and most scholarly of the books and herbarium specimens. The books were all labeled to indicate their source; the herbarium--a collection of dried specimens--was not specifically mentioned in the original Arnold Trust, established in 1872.

Fingold Turns Down Petition

The Association, which includes Grenville Clark '03, Henry F. duPont '03, and John S. Ames '01, felt such a shift to be detrimental to the Arboretum. Before the actual transfers, it therefore sought approval from Fingold to stop the University's action. Figold, as Attorney-General, is the legal enforcer of public, as opposed to private, trusts.

In July of 1953, he turned down the petition, ruling that "to permit the use of the name of the Attorney General in cases like the present, where it is clear to him the trustee is acting in good faith and within the bounds of reasonable judgment and sound discretion, simply because others, equally in good faith, differ with the decision of the trustee, would open the door to unreasonable and vexatious litigations..."

Court Refuses Review

The Association then went to the State Supreme Court, seeking both nullification of Fingold's decision, and a formal rehearing. The Court, however, which heard the case last October, threw it out.

"In our opinion," the court ruled, "the decision of the Attorney-General not to permit the use of his name in a suit against the College for alleged breach of a public charitable trust was a purely executive decision which is not review-able in a court of justice. The duty of taking action to protect public charitable trusts and to enforce proper application of their funds rests solely upon the Attorney-General as the representative of the public interest."