Dean Pound Relinquishes Law School Leadership After 20 Years of Service

Relinquishing a post which has won him an international reputation, Roscoe Pound, dean of the Law School for 19 years, announced his approaching resignation yesterday at the age of 65. The resignation will take effect next September when Mr. Pound will have competed an even 20 years of service.

Yesterday's development confronts the Corporation with a problem it has dreaded to face for years. Under Mr. Pound's able guidance the Law School has so far successfully resisted all attempts of competitors such as Yale to wrest the legal blue ribbon from Cambridge. Whether it continues to do so depends largely on the choice of a successor.

To the average eye there is no leading contender on the scene. While logic would indicate that officials must have a solution in mind before announcing the resignation, however, there was no statement forthcoming from either University Hall or the Law School.

His Plans

As for Mr. Pound, he will retain the Carter professorship of Law after September. He plans to spend more time at his Watertown home with his wife, the former Mrs. Lucy Miller, whom he married four years ago and to devote himself to writing, particularly to completing a new book on jurisprudence.

No one has seen the need for changing the Law School curriculum to meet new demands more clearly than Dean Pound. In his report to President Conaut last year, he stressed the necessity of either reorganizing the present system of courses or of extending the Law School course from three to four years.

His report disclosed the doubt that confronts legal training schools today, for he confessed his uncertainty as to the exact course to pursue. Nevertheless, he leaned strongly towards the idea of condensing College to three years and extending one's time at the Law School.

He is opposed to the inclusion of special courses in the social sciences and in business administration, a policy followed by the Yale Law School and apparently supports the case system as a foun- dation for legal training here.

His Life

Roscoe Pound, the son of Judge Stephen B. Pound, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on October 27, 1870. At the age of 18, he received his A.B. from the University of Nebraska and from 1888-89 was a student at the Harvard Law School.

A year after his marriage to Miss Grace Gerrard, who died in 1928, he was admitted to the Nebraska bar and practiced for a number of years. At this period he was also teaching as an assistant professor of Law at the University of Nebraska and from 1903-07 he served as Dean.

From 1907 to 1910 he taught at Northwestern and Chicago. It was in 1910 that he received his call to Harvard as Story Professor of Law, a position he held until 1913 when he became Carter Professor of Jurisprudence, a post which he will continue to hold after his resignation takes effect. He became Dean in 1916.

His Career

Among the many posts which he has held during his career so far: Director of the Botanical Survey of Nebraska 1892-1903; Commissioner of Appeals, the Supreme Court of Nebraska 1901-03; Nebraska commissioner on uniform state laws 1904-07; secretary of the Nebraska state bar association 1901-07; president of the Association of American Law Schools 1910; and a member of President Hoover's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1929.

He holds honorary degrees of doctor of law from the following universities: Harvard, Chicago, Brown, Union, Pittsburgh, Colorado, George Washington, California, Cincinnati and Cambridge, England