Roscoe Pound

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Roscoe Pound. (credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Oct. 27, 1870, Lincoln, Neb., U.S. — died July 1, 1964, Cambridge, Mass.) U.S. legal educator and botanist. After studying botany at the University of Nebraska and law at Harvard University (1889 – 90), he was admitted to the Nebraska bar, and he practiced law while also teaching at the state university (1890 – 1903). At the University of Nebraska he directed the state botanical survey (1892 – 1903) and discovered a rare fungus (Roscopoundia). He later taught at several law schools, most notably Harvard (1910 – 37), where he also served as dean (1916 – 36), instituting many reforms. He was perhaps the chief U.S. advocate of sociological jurisprudence, which holds that statutes and court decisions are affected by social conditions; his ideas apparently influenced the New Deal programs of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. After World War II he helped reorganize the judicial system of Taiwan.

For more information on Roscoe Pound, visit Britannica.com.

Roscoe Pound (1870-1964), American jurist and botanist, furthered the development of sociological jurisprudence, which significantly altered American legal thought.

Roscoe Pound was born at Lincoln, Nebr., on Oct. 27, 1870, the son of a judge. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1888, he earned a master of arts degree in 1889 and then attended Harvard Law School for a year. He passed the bar exam in 1890 and began practicing law, teaching at the University of Nebraska Law School, and working toward his doctorate in botany, which he earned in 1897. For several years he directed the botanical survey of Nebraska and discovered a rare lichen (later designated the "roscopoundia"). His botanical writings are still considered important.

As commissioner of appeals of the Supreme Court of Nebraska (1901-1903), Pound wrote 102 opinions that have often been cited. He was commissioner for uniform state laws for Nebraska (1904-1907) and dean of the law department at the University of Nebraska (1903-1907). He taught law at Northwestern University (1907-1909) and at the University of Chicago (1909-1910).

Pound's vast erudition included all phases of the law and jurisprudence as well as the classics and foreign languages. He often worked 16 hours a day and had a phenomenal memory and great intellectual curiosity. He became the leading exponent of sociological jurisprudence, that is, applying pragmatism to the law to make it amenable to society's needs rather than adhering to inapplicable precedents. Pound first set forth his concept of sociological jurisprudence in a 1906 address and continued to expound it for nearly a generation. At about the same time, he also began expressing his "formative era" concept, which stated that an indigenous new law for the country was evolved by American judges between 1789 and 1860.

In 1910 Pound became professor of law at Harvard. He was dean from 1916 to 1936 during what was called Harvard Law School's "golden age". He helped shape a faculty and program of legal education equipped to implement his concept of sociological jurisprudence. A large number of the law school graduates were active in formulating policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and Pound supported many of its early measures. But though he had once felt that the law stifled administration, he came to feel that courts must serve as a bulwark against potential dictatorship. Similarly, he became critical of the legal realists of the 1930s, whose thinking was founded in Pound's earlier work; he felt that they placed value only on experience in setting legal standards.

In 1936 Pound resigned as dean and was assigned to one of the first Harvard "roving professorships"; for the next 11 years he taught everything from law to the classics. In 1938 he was named director of the National Conference of Judicial Councils. He received the American Bar Association's medal for "conspicuous service to the cause of American jurisprudence" in 1940. He served as adviser to the Nationalist China Ministry of Justice (1946-1949), which was reorganizing its judicial system. When he returned to the United States, he was extremely critical of America's China policy, because of its ineffective support of Chiang Kai-shek.

Pound retired from Harvard in 1947 but continued to teach at a number of law schools for several years and maintained his steady flow of publications. In all, he authored over 1, 000 items, including his massive fivevolume Jurisprudence (1959). He died in Cambridge, Mass., on July 1, 1964.

Further Reading

Pound's own Roscoe Pound and Criminal Justice was edited by Sheldon Glueck in 1965. Studies of Pound include Paul Lombard Sayre, The Life of Roscoe Pound (1948), and Arthur Leon Harding, ed., The Administration of Justice in Retrospect: Roscoe Pound's 1906 Address in a Half-century of Experience (1957).

Additional Sources

Sayre, Paul Lombard, The life of Roscoe Pound, Littleton, Colo.: Rothman, 1981, 1948.

Wigdor, David, Roscoe Pound; philosopher of law, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press 1974.

Roscoe Pound was one of the leading figures in twentieth-century legal thought. As a scholar, teacher, reformer, and dean of Harvard Law School, Pound strove to link law and society through his "sociological jurisprudence" and to improve the administration of the judicial system. In the early decades of the century, Pound was viewed as a radical thinker for arguing that the law is not static and must adapt to the needs of society. By the 1930s, however, he was seen as a more conservative figure, fighting the growth of federal government.

Pound was born on October 27, 1870, in Lincoln, Nebraska. The son of a judge, Pound attended the University of Nebraska, earning a bachelor of arts degree in botany in 1888. His father convinced him to attend Harvard Law School, but he stayed only one year. The death of his father led Pound to return to Lincoln, where he passed the Nebraska bar examination and was admitted to the bar in 1890.

From 1890 to 1903, Pound practiced law, taught at the University of Nebraska, earned a doctorate in botany from the university, and served as the director of the state botanical survey. In addition, he helped organize the Nebraska Bar Association in 1900.

A gifted scholar, Pound could have had a distinguished career in the sciences, but his appointment in 1901 as a commissioner of appeals for the Nebraska Supreme Court permanently shifted his career to the law. As a commissioner he acted as a temporary appellate judge, helping to reduce a backlog of cases. His opinions emphasized substance over procedure and reflected a concern with the practical effect of the law.

In 1903 he was appointed dean of the Nebraska College of Law. His academic interests merged with his experience as a court commissioner in 1906 when he addressed the annual convention of the American Bar Association in St. Paul. His speech, titled "The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice," was a call to improve court administration and a preview of his theory of law, called sociological jurisprudence. The speech, which has remained a classic statement on judicial administration, attracted the attention of John Henry Wigmore, the dean of Northwestern University School of Law. He asked Pound to join his faculty in 1907. Pound's two-year association with the school was marked by his organization of the First National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology, which gathered participants from many professions to discuss ways to reform the criminal law. The conference was one of the first of Pound's efforts to give practical application to sociological jurisprudence.

In 1910, after having spent a year at the University of Chicago, Pound joined the faculty at Harvard Law School. He was appointed dean in 1916 and served until 1936. It was during this period that Pound's views and influence were at their zenith.

Pound's contribution to U.S. jurisprudence was to further the work that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had begun in debunking the legal theories that had dominated during the nineteenth century. Pound fought the notion that an unchanging and inflexible "natural law" formed the basis for the common law. He did believe that some constant principles existed in the common law, particularly ones dealing with methods, to which he gave the name "taught legal tradition." Pound firmly believed that the implementation of the principles of the taught legal tradition by wise common-law judges resulted in substantive change, which reflected changes in society. As the interpreters of the common law, judges had a special duty to consider the practical effects of their decisions and to strive to ensure that judging facilitated rather than hindered societal growth.

Pound placed his sociological jurisprudence in opposition to what he termed "mechanical jurisprudence," which he characterized as a common but odious practice whereby judges woodenly applied precedent to the facts of cases without regard to the consequences. For Pound, the logic of previous precedent alone would not solve jurisprudential problems.

Despite his desire to see the law adapt to the needs of society, Pound believed that the common law should develop slowly and that it should only follow changes in society. Certainty in the law, especially in areas such as commercial and property law, was often more beneficial than attempts at practical alteration. He revealed a more conservative cast of mind in his distrust of legislative statutes, arguing that the slow development of judge-made law was preferable to the radical changes often brought by legislation. His study of biology led him to believe that the law, like nature, was a seamless web and that changes in one part might produce totally unexpected and undesirable results in a distant part.

Pound's sociological jurisprudence fell out of favor in the 1930s, when the "legal realist" movement attacked his philosophy. Though the legal realists and Pound had much in common, the realists, especially Jerome N. Frank, differed over the nature of judicial decision making. Where Pound believed that judges, with the objective application of his principles of sociological jurisprudence, could logically produce the result in a given case, Frank, in his book Law and the Modern Mind (1933), thought otherwise. Frank maintained that not logic but the unique psychological makeup of judges was the most important factor in the resolution of a lawsuit. The realists pointed out, after analyzing many court decisions, that often a judge could support a decision for either side on a given legal issue. Therefore, they argued, judges were forced to decide cases on the basis of their subjective feelings of what was "fair" and then turn to the applicable part of the case law to furnish legal fig leaves to hide what they had actually done.

Pound reacted angrily to this analysis in a series of law review articles. He believed that the rules of law, especially rules of commercial law and property, could be determined with certainty and even attain the logical coherence of propositions of Euclid. Pound conceded that it was important to study the psychology of judging, but only to prevent the aberrations the realists claimed were common. Pound thought that the realists emphasized the oddities, and not the central factors, in their analysis of the judicial system. He disliked the realists for discounting the importance of the common law and for their willingness to advocate that the law be used to change society. For Pound, the legal system worked best when the law followed society. Any attempt to make society follow the law was futile.

Pound resigned as dean of the Harvard Law School in 1936. He was appointed the first university professor of Harvard in 1937, an appointment that permitted him to teach in any of the academic units of Harvard. An opponent of much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, Pound was actively involved in attempts to stop the great expansion of federal administrative agencies. He continued writing during his later years, publishing his monumental five-volume Jurisprudence in 1959. He died on July 1, 1964, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-three.

Roscoe Pound
Born	October 27, 1870(1870-10-27) Lincoln, Nebraska
Died	June 30, 1964 (aged 93)
Nationality	United States
Fields	Botany Law
Institutions	Harvard Law School
Alma mater	University of Nebraska
Influences	Louis Brandeis
Influenced	Zechariah Chafee

Nathan Roscoe Pound (October 27, 1870 – June 30, 1964) was a distinguished American legal scholar and educator.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Law career 3 Criminal Justice in Cleveland 4 Quotes 5 Miscellaneous 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 External links

Early life

Pound was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA to Stephen Bosworth Pound and Laura Pound.

Pound studied botany at the University of Nebraska (BA, 1888, & MA, 1889) in Lincoln, Nebraska where he became a member of Acacia Fraternity. ^[1]In 1889, he began the study of law; he spent one year at Harvard but never received a law degree. He received the first Ph.D., in botany, from the University of Nebraska in 1898.

Law career

In 1903, Pound became dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law. In 1910, Pound began teaching at Harvard and in 1916 became dean of Harvard Law School. He wrote "Spurious Interpretation" in 1907, Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence in 1914, The Spirit of the Common Law [1] in 1921, Law and Morals in 1924, and Criminal Justice in America in 1930.

In 1908, he was part of the founding editorial staff of the first comparative law journal in the U.S., the Annual Bulletin of the Comparative Law Bureau of the American Bar Association. He was also the founder of the movement for "sociological jurisprudence", an influential critic of the U.S. Supreme Court's "liberty of contract" (freedom of contract) line of cases, symbolized by Lochner v. New York (1905), and one of the early leaders of the movement for American Legal Realism, which argued for a more pragmatic and public-interested interpretation of law and a focus on how the legal process actually occurred, as opposed to the arid legal formalism which prevailed in American jurisprudence at the time. Pound would later turn against the movement and became a leading critic of the legal realists later in his life.

Criminal Justice in Cleveland

In 1922, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter undertook a detailed quantitative study of crime reporting in Cleveland newspapers for the month of January 1919, using column inch counts. They found that, whereas, in the first half of the month, the total amount of space given over to crime was 925 inches, in the second half it leapt to 6642 inches. This was in spite the fact that the number of crimes reported had only increased from 345 to 363. They concluded that although the city's much publicized "crime wave" was largely fictitious and manufactured by the press, the coverage had a very real consequence for the administration of criminal justice. Because the public believed they were in the middle of a crime epidemic, they demanded an immediate response from the police and the city authorities. These agencies wishing to retain public support, complied, caring "more to satisfy popular demand than to be observant of the tried process of law." The result was a greatly increased likelihood of miscarriages of justice and sentences more severe than the offenses warranted.^[2][3]

Quotes

One of his most oft-quoted views was on professionalism: The term [professionalism] refers to a group pursuing a learned art as a common calling in the spirit of public service - no less a public service because it may incidentally be a means of livelihood. Pursuit of the learned art in the spirit of a public service is the primary purpose. ^[4]

Miscellaneous

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (March 2009)

• In 1903 Pound, with George Condra, founded the Society of Innocents, the preeminent senior honor society at Nebraska. It is still in existence.
• Pound is a member of the Nebraska Hall of Fame.
• Pound was a Freemason, and was a member and Past Master of Lancaster Lodge No. 54 AF & AM Lincoln, Nebraska.
• Pound helped to found The Harvard Lodge A.F. & A.M. along with Kirsopp Lake a Professor of the Divinity School, and others.
• Pound was the brother of noted folklorist and scholar Louise Pound.

See also

• A Test of the News

Notes

1. ^ Acacia Fraternity. "Acacia Fraternity: Notable Acacians". http://www.acacia.org/about_notables.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-30. 
2. ^ Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (May 10, 2002). A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies. UK: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-22588-4.  p. 45-46
3. ^ Pound, Roscoe; Felix Frankfurter (1922). Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Foundation.  p. 546
4. ^ Pound, Roscoe (1953). The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co.,.  p. 5.

References

• Pound, Roscoe. American National Biography. 17:760-763. 1999.

External links

• Roscoe Pound papers at Nebraska State Historical Society
• Justice According to Law (1914) essay
• The Spirit of the Common Law (1921) book based on Dartmouth Alumni Lectures
• Roscoe Pound, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922). See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.
• Roscoe Pound, The Ideal Element In Law, ed. Stephen Presser (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 2002). See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.

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