The Ideal Element in Law / Edition 1

by Roscoe Pound

Overview

Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School, delivered a series of lectures at the Universityof Calcutta in 1948. In these lectures, he criticized virtually every modern mode of interpreting the law because he believed the administration of justice had lost its grounding and recourse to enduring ideals.

Now published in the U.S. for the first time, Pound’s lectures are collected in Liberty Fund’s The Ideal Element in Law, Pound’s most important contribution to the relationship between law and liberty.

The Ideal Element in Law was a radical book for its time and is just as meaningful today as when Pound’s lectures were first delivered. Pound’s view of the welfare state as a means of expanding government power over the individual speaks to the front-page issues of the new millennium as clearly as it did to America in the mid-twentieth century.

Pound argues that the theme of justice grounded in enduring ideals is critical for America. He views American courts as relying on sociological theories, political ends, or other objectives, and in so doing, divorcing the practice of law from the rule of law and the rule of law from the enduring ideal of law itself.

Roscoe Pound is universally recognized as one of the most important legal minds of the early twentieth century. Considered by many to be the dean of American jurisprudence, Pound was a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Nebraska and served as dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865973268
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/09/2002
Pages:	454
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Foreword by Stephen Presser vii
Table of Cases xix I. Is There an Ideal Element in Law? 1
II. Natural Law 32
III. Law and Morals 66
IV. Rights, Interests, and Values 109
V. The End of Law: Maintaining the Social Status Quo 140
VI. Promotion of Free Self-Assertion:
1. The Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century 171
VII. Promotion of Free Self-Assertion:
2. Nineteenth Century to the Present 200
VIII. Maintaining and Furthering Civilization 230
IX. Class Interest and Economic Pressure: The Marxian Interpretation 257
X. Later Forms of Juristic Realism 288
XI. The Humanitarian Idea 321
XII. The Authoritarian Idea 348 Epilogue 371
Glossary 375
Bibliography of Works Cited 387
Index 415