The Ideal Element in Law

by Pound, Roscoe

• ISBN13: 9780865973268
• ISBN10: 0865973261
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Liberty Fund

Summary

Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Calcutta in 1948. In these lectures, he criticised 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 US 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Stephen Presser
Table of Cases	xix
Is There an Ideal Element in Law?	1	(31)
Natural Law	32	(34)
Law and Morals	66	(43)
Rights, Interests, and Values	109	(31)
The End of Law: Maintaining the Social Status Quo	140	(31)
Promotion of Free Self-Assertion: 1. The Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century	171	(29)
Promotion of Free Self-Assertion: 2. Nineteenth Century to the Present	200	(30)
Maintaining and Furthering Civilization	230	(27)
Class Interest and Economic Pressure: The Marxian Interpretation	257	(31)
Later Forms of Juristic Realism	288	(33)
The Humanitarian Idea	321	(27)
The Authoritarian Idea	348	(23)
Epilogue	371	(4)
Glossary	375	(12)
Bibliography of Works Cited	387	(28)
Index	415