Roscoe Pound
Roscoe Pound (
1870 -
1964) was a distinguished American legal scholar and educator.
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. In 1889 he began the study of law spending one year at Harvard, and completed his law degree at
Northwestern University School of Law. He returned to Nebraska to practice law and continue his study of botany. He received a PhD in botany from the University of Nebraska in 1898.
In 1903, Pound became dean of the
University of Nebraska College of Law. Also in 1903 Pound, with
George Condra, founded the
Society of Innocents, the preeminent senior honor society at Nebraska. It is still in existence. 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. He was the founder of the movement for "sociological jurisprudence," an influential critic of the 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.
Pound was a brother of
Louise Pound, who was also a distinguished educator and author.
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 if 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.
