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External links: Added external link to Roscoe Pound's "An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Law on the OLL with HTML and PDF formats.
External links: Added external link to Roscoe Pound's "The Ideal Element In Law" on the Online Library of Liberty in HTML and PDF formats.
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*[http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/lawfacpub/1/ The Spirit of the Common Law] (1921) book based on Dartmouth Alumni Lectures
*[http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/lawfacpub/1/ The Spirit of the Common Law] (1921) book based on Dartmouth Alumni Lectures
* [http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2222 Roscoe Pound, ''An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law''] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922). See original text in [http://oll.libertyfund.org/ The Online Library of Liberty].
* [http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2222 Roscoe Pound, ''An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law''] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922). See original text in [http://oll.libertyfund.org/ The Online Library of Liberty].
* [http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/671 Roscoe Pound, ''The Ideal Element In Law''], ed. Stephen Presser (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 2002). See original text in [http://oll.libertyfund.org/ The Online Library of Liberty].


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Revision as of 17:44, 12 August 2009

Roscoe Pound
Born(1870-10-27)October 27, 1870
DiedJune 30, 1964(1964-06-30) (aged 93)
Nationality United States
Alma materUniversity of Nebraska
Scientific career
FieldsBotany
Law
InstitutionsHarvard Law School

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

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" 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

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Acacia Fraternity. "Acacia Fraternity: Notable Acacians". Retrieved 2008-10-30. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  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. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) p. 45-46
  3. ^ Pound, Roscoe (1922). Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Foundation. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) p. 546
  4. ^ Pound, Roscoe (1953). The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co.,. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) p. 5.

References

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