Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...greatness of Roscoe Pound, whose retirement was announced today, rests only superficially with his record as a teacher. Drawn from the Copeland-Kittredge mold, he has achieved his real stature through hold and original contribution to legal thought in the United States...
Confirming rumors that this term would be his last with the University, Professor Pound disclosed plans to return to China this year to complete the work he began last summer on the codification of Chinese law. "It is not yet time for a formal announcement," the 76-year old legal philosopher added, indicating that the project was still being negotiated with the Chinese Ministry of Justice...
Pound looked beyond the legal mechanism--beyond the maze of particular rules and forms in the workings of the judicial system--to the ideal element in the law and the raison d'etre of a legal order among men. What he discovered startled the juridical world of the early twentieth century. Law was not an end in itself for the sake of stability alone; nor was it a mere ordering of individual wills in the interplay of vicious competitive forces. The job of law was to harmonize conflicting interests in society through the force of an organized political structure...
...Enlightened social engineering" was his classic enunciation of the goal before us and the sociological view of the law his outstanding contribution to American jurisprudence. Not hidebound by the attorney's dogmas, he probed behind them to see how they squared with actualities. To equate legal formulas with changing modern values, a new lead in thinking was demanded; he advanced a belief that laws are above men but that they must serve men and reflect the ethics under which men live in a moment of history. Thirty years ago he realized our path must lie in an ideal of cooperation...
This dogged search for the golden mean of a just legal order which he has pursued through all the years of writings and teachings--through all his immense contributions of learning and exposition and practical aid to the courts--is the true testimony to Roscoe Pound's greatness. Today we observe with testy eye the state of justice across the globe. In the English-speaking countries, Roscoe Pound's philosophy of law remains a framework for the whole of law--from the earliest statutes to the latest labor legislation...