Horton and advocates of the merger, however, encountered a vociferous minority of CC pastors and laity who argued that the merger would threaten the autonomy of the local congregations by the introduction of presbyterian governance practices from the E&R Church, and that, legally, the General Council, the national legislative body, had no authority to enter its congregations into such a union in the first place. A Brooklyn church successfully sued in 1949 to restrain the merger from proceeding; in arguments before the appellate court, Horton and another CC leader, Truman Douglass, articulated that the General Council understood itself to be legally separate from the constituent congregations and not immediately subject to its directives, although admitting that it, likewise, had no power to compel participation in a merger. The court viewed these perspectives favorably, and the restraint was overturned in 1953. This enabled the final stages of the merger process to proceed, to the point of the actual union on June 25, 1957; the merged body took the name United Church of Christ.