Roscoe Pound - Law Career

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 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. According to Pound, these jurisprudential movements advocated “the adjustment of principles and doctrines to the human conditions they are to govern rather than to assumed first principles.” While Pound was Dean, law school registration almost doubled, but his standards were so rigorous that only two-thirds of his students gained degrees. Among these were many of the great political innovators of the New Deal years.

During Roosevelt's first term, Pound initially supported the New Deal. In 1937, however, Pound would turn against the New Deal and the legal realist movement altogether after Roosevelt proposed packing the federal courts and bringing independent agencies into the executive branch. Other factors contributing this "lurking conservatism" within Pound included bitter battles with liberals on the Harvard law faculty, the death of his wife, and a sharp exchange with Karl Llewellyn. Pound, however, had for years been an outspoken advocate of these court and administrative reforms that Roosevelt proposed and it was acknowledged that he only became conservative because he saw an opportunity to gain attention after his Harvard colleagues had turned on his ideas of government reform after Roosevelt had proposed them.

In 1937, Pound resigned as Dean of Harvard Law School to become a University Professor and soon became a leading critic of the legal realists. He proposed his ideas of government reform to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. In 1934, Pound received a medal from the Nazi government of Germany.