Professor Pound Is Polishing Up His Academic Technique as First 'Rover'

Roscoe Pound, for twenty years Dean of the Law School and now University or just plain "roving" professor, told of the difficulty of limbering up his academic teaching technique in his new position and discussed his present activities in an interview at his office in Langdell Hall yesterday.

It is more than twenty years since he gave a course of non-professional nature such as the one which he is giving this year in the University, an introduction to the History and System of Angle-American Law, and Pound suggested that he was going ahead cautiously with it. "It's teaching me something," he said.

Questioned on his plans for the newly created job which he took over last fall, he replied that he was going "to keep to something I know about," and not extend his teaching activities to fields in which he does not feel expert.

The only definite innovation he is contemplating is a seminar in political and legal philosophy, embracing, among others, the fields of the social sciences. He is now in the process of gathering material for this.

Overcrowding in the legal profession, Pound said, in response to a question, should be attacked not by restricting admissions to the law schools but by greater strictness in qualifications for admission to the bar. The problem of relating the teaching and practice of law involves a delicate balance between extremes of theory and practicality, said Pound, using the Seylla and Charybdis image, with the danger both of losing contact with the profession and becoming too closely attached to it.

Besides preparing three articles for the Law Review, the last of which appears in this month's issue, on "Fifty Years of Jurisprudence," Pound is working on a book on jurisprudence which he had almost completed when his assumption of the office of Dean in 1916 and subsequently the World War interrupted it. A great deal has happened since in the science of law, he said, and the early work must now be completely rewritten.