Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR’d book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring … More >>
#1 by FrKurt Messick on April 29, 2010 - 11:58 am
Roscoe Pound was Carter Professor of Jurisprudence at Harvard University in the first half of the twentieth century. This text, derived from a series of lectures given in the 1910s, has held up over time (its initial publication was in 1921, and has been reissued periodically ever since) as a touchstone of historical and theoretical explorations of what common law is and how it operates, both in the British and American contexts.
Unlike constitutional law and other kinds of codified law from legislative bodies, the common law is more of a development from the masses, at least insofar as it connects with the judicial aspects of government which in turn recognises certain things as legal or illegal. Indeed, Pound sees the triumph of the idea of the supremacy of law over authority to be a victory of the spirit of the common law (specifically, he refers to the supremacy of the law over the Stuart monarchs in Britain, but also that common law practice has survived Renaissance, Reformation and the institution of Roman law).
Pound looks at the common law in different phases – feudal underpinnings, Puritan influences, relationship between judiciary and the Crown/executive authority, philosophers such as Locke, and growing judicial practice in the trans-Atlantic context during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Pound does have a distaste of law for law’s sake, and warns against attitudes that are ‘a natural result of measuring the law solely by standards drawn from the law itself.’ He is strongly concerned with the idea that the law be accessible to all, regardless of background, education, or ability to pay – there should not be one law for the rich and another for the poor.
Law is for the betterment of society, and the spirit of the common law has this at heart, according to Pound. This text of Pound’s, an enduring favourite, is a good exposition of how and why the law is important for a well-regulated society, and how the spirit of the common law needs to be cherished, preserved and strengthened by the legal profession for the sake of whole community.
Rating: 5 / 5