Education: Law & the Welfare State

As a teacher of law and dean of Harvard Law School for more than a quarter of a century, Roscoe Pound was a leader of the lusty pack of lawyers who set about destroying the 19th Century image of the law as an inflexible and inviolate set of principles. "The law," Dean Pound said at the time—and still says—"is social engineering." But by the time he retired from Harvard (in 1947), Pound had discovered that some of his eager social engineers, discarding absolute values as the progressive educators had, seemed intent on scrapping the very foundation of U.S. jurisprudence along with...