The Involuntary Good Samaritan

Like most people, 79-year-old Roscoe Pound believes in succoring the needy, the hungry and the abandoned. The spry ex-dean of Harvard Law School also accepts the continuing growth of what he calls the "service state." But he is alarmed by the way juries and judges, particularly in damage cases, are caught up in the same philosophy and are stretching the old meanings of law to achieve these humanitarian ends. Said he last week to the New York County Lawyers' Association:

"In the English-speaking world, until the present generation, security has meant security from aggression or fault or wrongdoing of others. But today [it] is made to include security against one's own fault, improvidence or ill luck, and even defects of character . . . Thus a developing humanitarian idea seems to think of repairing at someone's expense all loss to everyone, no matter how caused. It seems to presuppose that everyone must be able to expect a full economic and social life.

"To fulfill this expectation . . . the law seems more & more to be called on ... to pull him out of the ditch, bind up his wounds, set him on his way and pay his hotel bill. . .

"Yet achieving of high humanitarian purposes by the easy method of using the involuntary good Samaritan ... is not edifying. There ought to be a better method of making the legal order effective for our humanitarian ideals than that of Robin Hood or that of the pickpocket who . . . was so moved by the preacher's eloquence that he picked the pockets of everyone in reach and put the contents in the plate . . .

"Relief from the burden of poverty, relief from want, relief from fear . . . are laudable humanitarian ideals. But much at least of the laudable, humanitarian program, if not beyond practical attainment, is certainly beyond practical attainment through law."

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