Social Engineer

The greatness of Roscoe Pound, whose retirement was announced today, rests only superficially with his record as a teacher. Drawn from the Copeland-Kittredge mold, he has achieved his real stature through hold and original contribution to legal thought in the United States.

Pound looked beyond the legal mechanism--beyond the maze of particular rules and forms in the workings of the judicial system--to the ideal element in the law and the raison d'etre of a legal order among men. What he discovered startled the juridical world of the early twentieth century. Law was not an end in itself for the sake of stability alone; nor was it a mere ordering of individual wills in the interplay of vicious competitive forces. The job of law was to harmonize conflicting interests in society through the force of an organized political structure. ". . . We may think of the task of the legal order," declared Pound, "as one of precluding friction and eliminating waste; of conserving the goods of existence in order to make them go as far as possible . . ."

"Enlightened social engineering" was his classic enunciation of the goal before us and the sociological view of the law his outstanding contribution to American jurisprudence. Not hidebound by the attorney's dogmas, he probed behind them to see how they squared with actualities. To equate legal formulas with changing modern values, a new lead in thinking was demanded; he advanced a belief that laws are above men but that they must serve men and reflect the ethics under which men live in a moment of history. Thirty years ago he realized our path must lie in an ideal of cooperation rather than one solely of competitive self-assertion.

Widespread approval of social welfare legislation by the judiciary bears witness to the impact of Pound's thesis upon our national conscience. Yet his is a middle-way position: there is strong insistence that "we are not compelled, because we recognize cooperation as a factor in civilization, to sacrifice all that was achieved in the last century by working out a system of individual rights."

This dogged search for the golden mean of a just legal order which he has pursued through all the years of writings and teachings--through all his immense contributions of learning and exposition and practical aid to the courts--is the true testimony to Roscoe Pound's greatness. Today we observe with testy eye the state of justice across the globe. In the English-speaking countries, Roscoe Pound's philosophy of law remains a framework for the whole of law--from the earliest statutes to the latest labor legislation.