Education: Fly-Paper Dean

To the average Harvardman, Roscoe Pound is a detached intellect with a round, cheery face and a green eyeshade, seated in the centre of a huge horseshoe desk, periodically emitting pithy dicta. Last week the intellect emitted a dictum of unusual interest: one year hence Roscoe Pound will resign as dean of the Harvard Law School. Reported Harvard’s pressagent: “Dean Pound will continue to hold the Carter Professorship of Law. He explained that he wished to devote more of his time to writing, particularly to completing a book on jurisprudence.”

Law School men know that Dean Pound, 65, is one of the ranking U. S. authorities on jurisprudence, a tireless legal reformer who has long campaigned to simplify and de-emotionalize legal processes, adapt English common law to 20th Century U. S. conditions. His most famed dictum: “The law must be stable but cannot stand still.”

In his own opinion, Roscoe Pound’s greatest gift is his “flypaper memory.” As a boy in Lincoln, Neb., he disrupted a Sunday-School contest for memorizers of Bible verses by rattling them off by the chapter after one reading. Years later the members of a Neighborhood Club in Belmont, Mass., who met weekly to hear a paper by one of their number, were nonplussed by Member Pound’s habit of arising after each paper, no matter what the subject, to give a more authoritative treatment. His particular interests are botany, Freemasonry, military history of the Civil War.

Roscoe Pound was 12 when he entered the University of Nebraska. Husky and fast, he played football and baseball, formed a habit, which he kept up until a decade ago, of trotting one mile each day. After graduation and a year at Harvard Law School, he worked in a Lincoln law office a few years until one day his employer called him in, said: “Roscoe, you know enough law. Go see the county bar examiner. And take along a box of cigars.” The examiner opened the box of cigars, noted that they were his favorite brand, reflected: “Well, Roscoe, if your boss has educated you as well in the law as he has in cigars, you are well enough qualified to practice. That’s all.”

During a 17-year career of practicing and teaching in Nebraska, Lawyer Pound found time to direct a botanical survey of the State. There is a roscopoundia lichen. In 1910 he went to Harvard Law School, in 1916 received the deanship, a job from which many another institution has vainly tried to pry him. Once he was actually elected president of the University of Wisconsin. On the wintry night he turned it down, 700 Law School students crowded around his house to cheer: “Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Pound, Pound, POUND.” Twice married but childless, fatherly Dean Pound has helped many a student through social and financial troubles. Roscoe Pound’s day begins at 6:30 a. m., ends at midnight. Often he spends most of it inside his walnut horseshoe desk which is lined with some 300 books. When he wants one he spins around in his swivel chair, gets it at first grasp, buries his nose in it to overcome extreme myopia. When callers come he pushes up his eyeshade, chuckles merrily. The Harvard Lampoon once ran a picture of a pansy whose petals resembled unmistakably the chubby cheeks, droopy mustache and twinkly eyes of the law dean.

Professionally, the greatest regret of Dean Pound’s career was his service on the National (Wickersham) Commission on Law Observance & Enforcement, whose curious straddle on Prohibition he did his best to defend. Personally, the time in Washington was well spent, for between sessions he courted his second wife. With her he has lately taken junkets to Europe and Hawaii, will probably find time for more after his retirement.