dealt with many cases involving the above clause, from Fletcher v. Peck to People v. Marx, I feel that for the sake of this essay, a comparison should be made between Trustees v. Dartmouth and Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell because the Court’s decisions in both cases lie at opposite ends of a spectrum. The contrasting decisions also display the Court’s declining dependency on the exact words of the contract clause.In 1769, Dartmouth College was chartered by the English Crown, which authorized a twelve-member board of trustees to run the college and for them to appoint their successors. However, in 1816, the state legislature of New Hampshire passed a law completely reorganizing the government of the college and changing the name to Dartmouth University. The new state legislature increased the size of the board of trustees to twenty-one, established a board of overseers, and gave the governor the power to appoint new trustees and overseers. The old trustees of the college challenged the validity of the new law and sued William Woodward, the treasurer, to recover corporate property that was entrusted to him under the new legislation. When the matter was brought to the State court, they upheld the legislation. The incumbent trustees then brought the case to the Supreme Court.In deciding the matter, the Supreme Court’s first issue they had to contend with was that if the original charter was indeed a contract, was it a contract protected by the Constitution of the United States? The Court found that the original charter was a contract because its purpose was for the security and disposition of property and because of these reasons, it was a contract within the letter of the Constitution. After finding the English Charter to be a contract, the second question the Court had to answer was: does the act of 1816 impair the original charter? The Court decided that the act of 1816 gave the college a new ...
