As the final judgement on decades of belligerence and contested authority and as an inaugural act for the second centenary of the Franklin Fund, in 1908, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made the board of managers of the Franklin Fund ‘a body corporate under the name The Franklin Foundation’. The decree built on the 1904 Supreme Judicial Court's construction of the board of managers, declaring the right of the court to appoint successors to the eight lay members and remove any of the eight managers for ‘cause’. The three ministers would qualify as members as long as they held their appointments as the clergy of the three churches specified in the codicil. The court decreed that the board be ‘deemed a board or department of the city of Boston and on behalf of the city should have custody, management and control of the Franklin Union and of part of the fund accumulating for the second hundred years’. The city retained title to the Franklin Union, the land it sat on, and any of the funds given to the city of Boston for the establishment of the trades school. The title to the second century fund was also recognized as vested in the city. The Franklin Foundation was entitled to hold title to any funds donated to the Franklin Union after 1908.