Pound Discusses Legal Reform in China After Visit

Only recently arrived from China in time to keep a first meeting engagement with his social relations class Wednesday, Roscoe Pound, University Professor, told the press yesterday how he hoped the Chinese would be able to reorganize their judicial system and codify their law.

Answering questions from behind his inevitable green visor in his Langdell Hall office, he stated that one outcome of his commission by the National Government of China was to advise the jurists of the country to spend some three years organizing a book on the principles of Chinese law "based on their own institutions rather than on comparative law of Western countries."

Wants Encouragement

"What they want from us more than anything else is encouragement," he said of the general political situation there. "They had the corrupt, warlords out and a reform program well under way when the Japanese invasion came along and upset everything.

Although the Chinese have adopted the pattern of the English common law, Pound said that he had urged their teachers of law to pursue a course of education, interpretation, and application of exiting codes, through traditional juristic means.

Remarking that his extensive travels through China in the past three months he had not seen any evidence of civil war, he gave the opinion that the "war" would not last much longer and that it was only because the Nationalists chose to delay for negotiations that it had lasted as long as it has.