Man with a Memory

In his cluttered office in Harvard's Langdell Hall an old man wearing a green eyeshade was turning the pages of a new book. The old man looked like a cross between Owen Wister and Rudyard Kipling. His name was Roscoe Pound. The book looked heavy. Its title: Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies: Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pound. Dean Roscoe Pound, doing his best not to look too pleased, said, "A man is entitled to have his head swell a little over that."

The book had come just in time to cap a long career. Last week Roscoe Pound announced that after 48 years of teaching (37 at Harvard), he would retire in June. He had stepped down as Dean of the Harvard Law School in 1936 to become the first of the University's "roving professors." Now, after eleven years of teaching whatever he liked, from sociology to Lucretius, he was about to give up that pleasant job too.

With his retirement, Harvard will lose not only a great teacher but one of the top U.S. authorities on jurisprudence. His admirers say that he has revolutionized the teaching of law; his detractors agree that he has but wish he hadn't. He was the first to systematize what was only a vague stirring in men like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and German jurists: the theory that law must look to the world around it as well as to its codes. He did much to change the accent from fixed rules (analytical jurisprudence) to social needs (sociological jurisprudence).

In Pound's time, Harvard Law shifted from a school that mostly turned out private barristers and corporation lawyers with broad-A accents, to a training school for government lawyers too. The growth of administrative law and the spread of governmental bureaus and commissions made plenty of jobs for this new kind of graduate. Pound hoped they would help write good laws; he was not a man who wanted courts to invade the functions of legislation. Only last week he cracked out publicly against "judges today [who] attempt to be statesmen and interpret laws without guidance by the intent of those who enacted them." His dictum: "Law must be stable, and yet it cannot stand still."

"The secret of my success," Roscoe Pound once wrote, "is my blame memory." As a boy in Lincoln, Neb. (he was the son of a local judge), he used to disrupt Sunday school classes by rattling off a chapter of the Bible after only one reading. After graduating from the University of Nebraska at 17, he studied and practiced law, found time to take a Ph.D. in botany and direct a botanical survey of Nebraska (there is a roscopoundia lichen).

His 20 years as dean were the Harvard Law School's golden age. His faculty was famed: a volatile compound whose ingredients included the conservatism of the late Edward H. ("Bull") Warren, the New Dealism of James Landis and the confused leftism of Felix Frankfurter. Harvard turned out squads of bright and earnest lawyers who wrote or administered much of the early New Deal legislation (among them: Thomas Corcoran. David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson). Its postgraduate courses were the best in the U.S. Dean Pound's standards were high; and his customary greeting to incoming classes--"Gentlemen, take a good look at the persons seated on either side of you, for one of you will not be with us next year"--has become legend.

At 76, Pound still rises at 5:30, lumbers into his book-lined office promptly at 7. There he works with his nose almost touching the papers before him. His desk is piled so high with books that he and his secretary, mutually invisible, have to shout at each other.

Pound is retiring, but not stopping work: he is finishing another book on jurisprudence (his 17th), is busy on a plan to reorganize China's judicial system for Chiang Kaishek. Of his decision to stop teaching, he says: "It is best to retire before people begin wondering why you don't."

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