A Desk and ‘Dalliance with the Nazis’

On the fourth floor of the Harvard Law School library, the Caspersen Room boasts a collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art, displaying exhibits from the Law School’s Historical & Special Collections. Several of these exhibits rest on a circular desk in the corner of the room, a piece of the Law School’s history itself. But the history of this desk, more specifically its first owner, is fraught with antisemitism and ties to the Nazi party.

The desk was designed specifically for Roscoe Pound, the dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. Pound wanted a desk that allowed him to seamlessly multitask, and architect Charles A. Coolidge, who helped design the expanded Langdell Hall, created a setup where Pound could swivel in a chair to attend to different tasks around the desk.

After Pound’s deanship, the desk remained in the dean’s office, then was moved to the main reading room as a reference desk. Later, it was placed in the lobby of Langdell Hall as a receptionist’s desk. A display of historical photos on the desk illustrates its long usage at the school. These photos “help round out its story,” according to the accompanying caption.

But there is another caption next to the display: one addressing Pound’s “Troubled Legacy.” While Pound is often remembered for pioneering sociological jurisprudence, his time as dean contains a much more concerning legacy. During the 1930s, Pound visited Germany and condoned Nazi rule.

Daniel R. Coquillette, a visiting law professor at HLS in fall 2023, was alerted to Pound’s history with Nazi Germany by concerned Jewish students. While writing a book on the history of HLS in 2020, Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball, a professor at the University of Ohio, found that Pound made multiple visits to Germany and Austria and accepted an honorary degree from the University of Berlin.

Researcher Peter Rees learned that Pound even socialized with prominent Nazis who were later executed for war crimes. Rees, who lived in Germany, also discovered that Pound’s assistant, Anton-Herman Chroust, was a “Nazi agent,” according to Coquillette. Pound provided an alibi for Chroust when he was charged and investigated for being a participant in the Blood Purge, Adolf Hitler’s infamous massacre of hundreds of his own party members to consolidate his power.

Pound’s connection to Chroust was “sort of like a string I just kept on pulling, and it got longer and longer,” Rees says.

Pound defended Chroust by saying that Chroust was with him when the Blood Purge took place. However, according to Pound’s diary, they weren’t together at the time. “For someone like Pound, who was very intelligent, I just don’t think he could have made a mistake of that nature regarding something as important as that,” Rees explained.

A 1996 article in the Harvard Law Record — an independent HLS student newspaper — by then-HLS student Rafael Mares argued that Pound even “fiercely fought the appointment of three Jewish tenure candidates” and “openly supported Adolf Hitler” during his deanship. However, some Jewish alumni defended Pound in the Law Record, asserting that he was not antisemitic.

Kimball describes Pound as an “enigma.” At the beginning of Pound’s deanship, Kimball explains, “he was an opponent of the antisemitic policies of University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell.” Yet, paradoxically, he later looked “past the antisemitism of Nazi Germany.”

“His whole career is filled with these paradoxes,” Kimball says. For instance, despite pioneering a legal theory that examined the social context behind judicial decisions, Pound later abandoned sociological jurisprudence and even denounced it. Pound also had a temper and stubbornly refused to reform an outdated curriculum.

On top of it all, he left behind a “failed fundraising campaign” for Harvard Law that had been unsuccessful “because he was so egocentric,” according to Kimball. “He thought he could just write a couple pamphlets, and all the money would come pouring in.”

By the late ’30s, “he had so disaffected the faculty and was regarded as heavy-handed in his management of the school,” Kimball says, “that the dalliance with the Nazis was just regarded as another symptom.”

Paradoxes aside, Pound’s actions were harmful. Pound asserted that there was no persecution of Jewish scholars in Germany after his 1934 trip even though many American academics had spoken out against the country’s growing antisemitism.

“There are countless students, alumni, staff, and faculty at the Law School whose grandparents would have gotten out of Germany in time if they hadn’'t believed in what Pound was writing,” Coquillette says.

So last February, when Law School students approached the collections staff with concerns about Pound’s desk being on display, the department worked with the students to provide more context about Pound’s history — leading to the caption that rests on the desk today.

“We really appreciated them coming to us,” says Lesley A. Schoenfeld, an administrator of the collections. “Because they’re right — we wanted to tell a better story.”

The desk remains in the Caspersen Room, now with the context of Pound’s complicated past. “It strikes me that his desk is kind of a metaphor for the contradictions and paradoxes,” explains Kimball. “You’d expect a desk to be a rectangle, but it’s a circle. That’s kind of a metaphor for Roscoe Pound.”

Pound’s name lives on through Pound Hall at the Law School and the desk. But, for all those who visit the Casperson Room, Pound’s fraught history is at least now clear.

Schoenfeld sees the desk as a “learning opportunity.” For her, it’s “better to acknowledge the history than to pretend like it doesn’t exist.”