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Nathan Roscoe Pound (October 27, 1870 – June 30, 1964) was a distinguished American legal scholar and educator. He was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Pound as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

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. 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.

University of Nebraska Football

The University of Nebraska fielded its first football team the year after Pound graduated. Pound traveled with the teams to their games, including their first one. He also covered the team in the student newspaper and even refereed some matches. Pound created many chants and songs for the team and helped create a fan base that traveled well, which is something that the Cornhuskers still see to this day.

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.

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.

Personal life

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• 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. He also served as Deputy Grand Master for the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 1915 and delivered a series of Masonic lectures for the Grand Lodge in March and April 1916.
• 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.

Notes

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.
• "Finding aid for Roscoe Pound, Papers, 1888-1964.". Harvard Law School Library. http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/findingAidDisplay?_collection=oasis&inoid=4837. 
• www.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight/classroom/related/hls-deans.html
• Roscoe Pound in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.