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39 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 383 (1964)
In Praise of Erie--And of the New Federal Common Law

handle is hein.journals/nylr39 and id is 395 raw text is: IN PRAISE OF ERIE-AND OF THE NEW FEDERAL COMMON LAW HENRY J. FRIENDLY* T IS in no perfunctory fashion that I own my pleasure at the opportunity of delivering this lecture before our Association. I say our advisedly, for my recollections of this building go back to the summer of 1927 when I was working, under the guidance of Professor Frankfurter as he then was, on a paper not unrelated to my subject tonight,1 and later for one of the most beloved men ever to practice at our bar, Emory R. Buckner, at the time United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It was during that summer also that I had the good fortune to be presented, in his chambers next door, to that great judge and saintly man whom these lectures honor. I shall spare you any further recital of memories of this House-save only a mention of having been privileged to serve on the Executive Committee of this Association during the presidency of Harrison Tweed, an enduring example of how one man can remould an institution. When Judge Charles E. Clark, whose recent untimely death has been such a loss not only to his court but to the entire profes- sion, took the Erie case2 as the topic for his Cardozo lecture some years ago, he noted that it was not the subject itself, but its de- velopment in formal lecture, which requires some fortitude. In 1964, both may be thought to require not simply fortitude but apology. If a considerable pond of ink about Eric had already ac- cumulated in 1945, this has now become a rather large lake. You may reasonably ask whether anything more can usefully be said. Yet the lapse of a quarter century-Erie celebrated its silver jubilee, quite unostentatiously, last April-may afford some perspectives that were not so discernible in its early youth, even if, in dealing with so large a subject, I shall often be obliged to compress into a paragraph what would warrant a * Henry J. Friendly is a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. This Article is the text of the twenty-first annual Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture which was delivered before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on January 16, 1964, with a few changes, mostly to take account of decisions since delivery of the lecture. I. Friendly, The Historic Basis of Diversity Jurisdiction, 41 Harv. L. Rev. 483 (1928). 2. Although citation is scarcely needed, it is Erie R.R. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938). 3. Clark, State Law in the Federal Courts: The Brooding Omnipresence of Erie v. Tompkins, 55 Yale L.J. 267, 269-70 (1946), reprinted, with a supple- mentary note, in Jurisprudence in Action 53 (1953). Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review

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