A 21st Century Vision for Law as a Profession:  100 Year After Roscoe Pound’s Call for Change in the Administration of Justice

In 1906, in St. Paul, Minnesota, American jurist Roscoe Pound delivered a seminal speech to the American Bar Association. In this well-noted address, he carefully described the sources underlying popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice. Despite the passage of 100 years, popular dissatisfaction with justice and with the legal profession continues and his insights are as highly relevant to the practice of law today as they were at the turn of the 20th century. In the context of Pound’s address, this seminar will explore the processes by which we administer justice, public perception of the legal profession, and the personal calling to the practice of law in the 21st century.

Roscoe Pound studied (1889–90) at Harvard law school, but never received a law degree. Pound was a prominent botanist as well as a jurist, and spent his early years in Nebraska practicing and teaching law, simultaneously serving as director of the state botanical survey (1892–1903). Pound was then professor of law at Harvard (1910–37) and dean of the law school (1916–36), where he introduced many reforms. He advanced the “theory of social interests” in law, asserting that law must recognize the needs of humanity, and take contemporary social conditions into account. Some theorists believe that his work may have inspired Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program in the 1930s. A prolific writer, his books on jurisprudence include Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1922, repr. 1959), Criminal Justice in America (1930, repr. 1975), Contemporary Juristic Theory (1940, repr. 1981), and Social Control through Law (1942).