Paragon of Principle

"Law must be stable, and yet it can not stand still," said Roscoe Pound. It was a principle that the renowned dean of Harvard Law School first began teaching the U.S. in 1906, when at 35 and still an obscure Nebraska lawyer, he stepped before the American Bar Association and blasted U.S. courts for archaic adherence to fixed rules.* There after famed as "The Schoolmaster of the A.B.A.," he followed the same principle in helping to shift the focus of U.S. law to social needs. Later, in his complaints about the resulting tendency of U.S. courts to become quasilegislatures, he was faithful as ever to his point. Last week, when Pound died at 93, a paragon of principle passed from U.S. law.

Massive, mustachioed, cigar-chomping Roscoe Pound was the precocious son of a local judge in Lincoln, Neb. "My blamed memory," he used to say. was so photographic that as a boy he broke up Sunday school classes by rattling off a chapter of the Bible after only one reading. At 12, he entered the University of Nebraska, at 17, emerged as a first-rate botanist, and between studying and practicing the law, he found time to earn a Ph.D. in botany and direct a botanical survey of Nebraska, which now boasts a rare lichen called roscopoundia.

Golden Age. It took Professor Pound only six years after he came to the faculty to become dean of Harvard Law School, and his two decades in the job (1916-36) were the school's golden age. Pound's combustible faculty ran a philosophical gamut from the conservatism of Edward H. ("Bull") Warren to the then liberalism of Felix Frankfurter.

His standards were so high that one-third of his students failed to win degrees. Those who did, including Dean Acheson, Thomas Corcoran and David E. Lilienthal, often plunged straight into writing New Deal legislation. Himself an early Roosevelt Republican, Pound later became disillusioned with executive pressure on the courts and supported the G.O.P.'s Alf Landon in 1936.

After resigning as dean that same year, Pound became Harvard's first "roving professor"--entitled to teach throughout the university--and for eleven years he expounded on everything from sociology to Lucretius. Prime founder of the pioneering American Law Institute, he wrote 44 books, ranging from Readings In Roman Law to The Spirit of the Common Law. At 76, already a master of French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin. Sanskrit and Spanish, he took up Chinese in order to reorganize Nationalist China's judicial system. When the Communists took over the mainland before he could finish, Pound lambasted the State Department for having abandoned Chiang Kaishek.

Service State. Peering out from under his inevitable green eyeshade, Pound spent the rest of his years at Harvard endlessly writing and watchdogging the "service state"--welfarist Big Government that "undertakes to perform for us every service short of looking after our immortal souls." The service state's threat to law, Pound fretted, was its tendency to use the courts to back its policies rather than allowing the courts to restrain power. Government without judicial restraint, he warned, meant "a mere preachment bill of rights, a hierarchy of superman administrative officials who ex-officio know what is good for us, and ultimately a super-superman to give directions to the hierarchy."

Pound's remedy--a zealously independent judiciary--is now avidly sought by every U.S. lawyer worthy of the name. It is his monument that he saw the danger early, and alerted less prescient men.

*Given in St. Paul, Minn., Pound's speech is considered so historic that last month the American Judicature Society, celebrating its golden anniversary, memorialized Pound's words with a bronze plaque in the Minnesota state capitol building.

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