Law Research
"Three quarters of a million for legal research" sounds to the layman like a new kind of endowment. The General Education Board last week announced such an appropriation toward the Harvard Law School's five-million-dollar endowment campaign, contingent upon Harvard's completing and designating $2,200,000 for the establishment of five new professorships and some graduate fellowships, and for additions to its law library and publication funds.
Research in the physical sciences is readily visualized in terms of guinea pigs, steam shovels, microscopes. Legal research means cloistered cerebration. To understand the parallel between legal research at Harvard and research in pure science as projected, for instance, by Secretary Hoover and his colleagues in the 20-million-dollar Research Endowment Fund lately undertaken (TIME, March 15), one must know about the Harvard staff that will conduct it--Dean Roscoe Pound and associates.
Picture a brisk, compact man of 55, with German blood in his veins and a wide experience of U. S. life, once a practicing attorney in his native Nebraska before he became a teacher of law. His personality matters little. His mind astonishes. The analytical and retentive powers are developed to a point that permits him to lecture, with staggering speed and intricacy and unfailing accuracy of citation, unaided by a single note. Second only to his accuracy is his energy. To hear Dean Pound tally up the work he has despatched in a day sounds like an ordinary man's hopeful program for the coming week.
It is certain that such a mind has not been marking time within the precincts of a dusty pedagogy during 27 years. It has a large side interest in botany, for which it has a second international reputation. And upon its central field it has driven through to fundamental strata. It has pondered the ineluctable problem of Law, the body of popular custom opposed to Law, the rational phenomenon. It has resolved in favor of the latter conception -- "Law is a practical matter" -- and it seeks to root out the arbitrary, the illogical, the instinctive. It realizes that "the great source of friction is human wilfulness, and the great cause of waste is insecurity," but it believes that, within the limits of intellection, law can become an exact science, not in the shallow sense of fashioning statutes to govern all conceivable occasions, but in the deeper sense of boiling down legal history to its philosophical essences and distributing these, in the form of simplified, uniform statutes, through society's legislative agencies; in the case of the U. S., through the state legislatures. This is a phase of the scientific development of law that Dean Pound sees as lagging behind society's other scientific advances, and that he will now be in a position to accelerate as the crowning work of a notable career.
The five new Harvard professorships designated are in fields not now occupied by men of the high Harvard calibre. Harvard has Felix ("Grand Manner") Frankfurter on utilities, Zechariah Chafee Jr. on equity, Joseph Warren on wills and property, Joseph Beale on conflicts, Samuel Williston on contracts.
The value placed by society upon the services of Harvard law graduates was figured out by the secretary of the class of 1905 and published last week. The members of that class are now lawyers in the neighborhood of 45 or 50 years old, and several public prints professed to find the incomes of this representative group "much lower than is generally believed." The report showed that "only" three men made $100,000 or more in 1925; "only" eight made $50,000 to $100,000; "only" nine made $25,000 to $50,000. From $5,000 to $10,000 was earned by 36 members of the class; 12 earned $2,500 to $5,000; four earned $2,500 or less.
Thought the rest of the U. S., whose average income is less than $2,000 per capita per annum: "It seems that folk who study law at Harvard have a 7-to-2 chance of making more than $5,000 a year 20 years later, and a 2-to-5 chance of making $10,000 or more."