THE LAW: One Legal World

"Is a law of the world possible?" So asked Roscoe Pound, 87, dean from 1916 to 1936 of Harvard Law School and still a dean among U.S. legal scholars, at a Brooklyn Bar Association meeting last week. His answer: not only is a law of the world possible, but it will probably precede any sort of sense-making world state. Tossing aside his 7,000-word manuscript, Dean Pound went on to deliver it practically verbatim from memory, was interrupted only once, when he was offered—and spurned—a chance to speak from his chair. From the first "crude attempts" at organized social control,...

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