Background
He was born on October 27, 1870 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States, the son of Judge Stephen Bosworth Pound and Laura Biddlecome.
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He was born on October 27, 1870 in Lincoln, Nebraska, United States, the son of Judge Stephen Bosworth Pound and Laura Biddlecome.
From the age of three, when he learned to read, Pound's phenomenal capacity to absorb and remember information was apparent. At age six Pound was taught German by his mother, a former schoolteacher; at fourteen he entered the University of Nebraska. His proposed course of study was classics, but he quickly developed an interest in botany and, after 1886, concentrated on that subject. After graduating from Nebraska in 1888 and reading law in his father's law office that summer, Pound enrolled at Nebraska as a graduate student in botany. Law and botany warred for Pound's favor after 1888, with botany winning at first.
Roscoe was sent to Harvard Law School for the 1889-1890 academic year. He simultaneously enrolled as a graduate student in botany and, with other students, began an extensive survey of the vegetation in Nebraska. This work formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation, eventually published (with F. E. Clements), on Phytogeography of Nebraska (1898). One reviewer called the dissertation "the pioneer work of its kind. "
He accepted an honorary degree from the University of Berlin in 1934.
His first article, "Ash Rust in 1888" appeared in the American Naturalist that year. Pound gave as his principal reason for returning to Nebraska his desire to assist his father in the latter's law practice, which he began to do in the summer of 1890.
The decade after 1890 was an exceptionally busy time for Pound. He practiced law in Lincoln, doing both trial and appellate litigation; he taught Roman law in the Latin department of the University of Nebraska and was an assistant professor at the College of Law, teaching pleading, jurisprudence, and criminal law; he served as an intermediate appellate judge (called a commissioner) on the Nebraska Supreme Court; he helped modernize the Nebraska State Bar Association; he campaigned vigorously for William McKinley in the 1896 and 1900 presidential campaigns.
Pound's appointment as dean of the Nebraska College of Law in 1903 marked a turning point in his professional life. At thirty-three his experience, although diverse, had been essentially regional; in the next decade he became a national figure.
He resigned from the Nebraska Supreme Court Commission to take the post, he continued to practice law. In 1905 he sought to leave the deanship to go into practice on a full-time basis, but was persuaded to stay on. Despite the relative modesty of the position, Pound found that it stimulated him to rethink his commitment to academic law and to devote more time to fusing his intellectual curiosity and his concern for practical affairs.
Pound wass famous for his 1906 address at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, "The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice, " which launched his national career. The address was a curious blend of traditional criticisms of the legal profession and prescient suggestions for reform. Six months later (1907) Wigmore offered Pound a post on the Northwestern faculty that included a sharply reduced teaching load. Pound accepted with enthusiasm.
In accepting Chicago's offer he turned down a Northwestern counteroffer of $7, 500 per year, the highest salary then paid to any law professor in the country. But he did not remain long at Chicago; in 1910 he accepted the Story professorship at Harvard. His scholarship between 1905 and 1910 combined forays into comparative jurisprudence with specific recommendations for change.
After 1910, Pound began, gradually, to make his philosophy of professional reform more explicit, and the tenor of his writing changed from largely critical to largely expository. His approach, embodied in the phrases "sociological jurisprudence" and "social engineering, " both complemented his earlier work and expanded upon it.
By 1916, when Harvard appointed him dean, Pound was the best-known law professor in the nation. Yet Pound's appointment as dean of Harvard Law School served as a powerful check to his creative energies. During the twenty years of his deanship, he continued to publish at an extraordinary rate; some of his best-known work, such as Interpretations of Legal History (1923).
By his retirement from the deanship at Harvard in 1936, Pound had, ironically, become a defender of the "old" ways against advocates of legislative and administrative power, interdisciplinary curricula, moral relativism, and a "university" model for law schools. Exhausted and embittered by internal dissensions in the last years of his deanship (the dissensions centered on proposed changes in the curriculum that he resisted), Pound gave up the deanship in 1936 to become Harvard's first university professor (1937 - 1947).
In addition to his scholarly efforts, he spent two years in China as an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek's government, was a regular contributor to debate on public issues involving the legal profession, and was a full-time law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1949 to 1953. In 1959 his five-volume work Jurisprudence appeared, and three years later he organized and contributed to a festschrift for Austin W. Scott, who had come to Harvard Law School the same year as Pound. In 1967 a last article of his appeared, posthumously, in the Valparaiso Law Review.
He died in Cambridge, Massachussets, at the age of ninety-three.
Roscoe Pound was influencial Dean of University of Nebraska College of Law, Dean of Harvard Law School. He was regarded as the creator and architect of an approach to common-law decision-making that favored, as he put it, the adjustment of legal principles and doctrines to the human conditions they are to govern. His two most famous articles: "Mechanical Jurisprudence" and "Liberty of Contract". Roscoe Pound also made a significant contribution to jurisprudence in the tradition of sociological jurisprudence, which emphasized the importance of social relationships in the development of law and vice versa. His best-known theory consists of conceptualising law as social engineering. According to main his idea, a lawmaker acts as a social engineer by attempting to solve problems in society using law as a tool.
Pound's politics were those of a "standpat" Republican; he bitterly denounced William Jennings Bryan and the Populists and complained about those who would "reform for the sake of reform. "
Pound assumed that the ultimate goal of botany was workable classification systems. He sought to develop a philosophy of procedure by which local rules were seen as embodiments of fundamental features of social organizations.
Pound found lawyers captives of commercial interests and more interested in beating the law than in being honorable. He claimed that the American system of justice lacked a comprehensive social philosophy at a time when a new social consciousness had emerged in American society. While Pound did not explicitly endorse social reform, he did call for procedural reforms of the legal system and suggested that several substantive common-law doctrines were outmoded. His approach, with its emphasis on flexible responses to changing social and economic conditions and on the ordering of affairs by professional and political elites, was unmistakably "progressive" and avowedly "pragmatic. " It was thus perfectly compatible with the advanced intellectual and political thought of the times.
Pound also opposed curriculum reform and experimental research programs seeking to integrate law with social sciences. He rejected the Realist movement in legal education, which had borrowed from his own work, and the New Deal, which he referred to as the "service state. "
Throughout the changes and controversy in his professional life Pound's personality remained roughly constant. In print he was, for most of his life, vigorous in expression but moderate in tone; in person he was blunt, abrupt, and relatively humorless, but approachable and unpretentious; in power he was autocratic and dogmatic. Despite his international reputation and his fluency in German, French, and Italian, he was not a cosmopolite; his avocational pursuits included American politics, American sports, and Cole Porter. To students Pound appeared gruff and exacting, if lacking in pretension. He was not a markedly successful teacher, but he did inspire them. As a teacher he tried to be an inspirational, authoritative force; as a dean he tried to cultivate alumni and at the same time dominate his faculty.
Despite his straightforwardness, bluntness, and disinclination to engage in speculative conversation, Pound was not dispassionate as a teacher or a colleague. He loved debate and was regularly provoked to respond to critics in print; he rigidly maintained views on legal education in the face of sharp opposition.
Pound had a passion for eating, which made him overweight for most of his adult life, although he ran daily until his sixties and walked twelve miles to and from work until his eighties. He shunned an overcoat in cold weather, believing that the body's adjustment to variations of temperature was a form of healthful exercise. Normally he worked ten hours a day, five days a week, plus a few hours on the weekends. He planned his schedule carefully and followed a regular routine. He remained physically and mentally alert until the very end of his life.
In 1899, after a four-year engagement, Pound married Grace Gerrard. Their two children died at birth. Pound's first wife died in 1928, and he was so shaken by her death that he took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard. On June 30, 1931, Pound married Lucy Berry Miller, with whom he was to live until her death in 1959, when he was in his ninetieth year.
