Roscoe Pound’s inscribed copy (to Irving M. Walker) of his book Contemporary Juristic Theory (1940).
The son of a federal trial judge in Nebraska, Roscoe Pound graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1888. He attended Harvard Law School for a year and was admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1890. After practicing law in Lincoln for several years, he earned a doctorate in botany (1897). By 1899 he had begun teaching law at Nebraska, and he became dean of the law school in 1903. He then took positions at several major law schools: Northwestern (1907), Chicago (1909), and Harvard (1910). He stayed at Harvard 37 years and served as dean for 20.
A bibliography of Pound’s writings fills more than 200 pages. His first legal article was “Dogs and the Law,” which appeared in The Green Bag in 1896; his last, on the Federal Tort Claims Act, appeared in Tulane Law Review in 1963. The father of “sociological jurisprudence,” Pound was a major figure in legal philosophy.
The recipient of this inscribed volume was the prominent Los Angeles lawyer Irving M. Walker (1885–1968), of Loeb, Walker & Loeb.
– Bryan A. Garner
“Built by Association: Books Once Owned by Notable Judges and Lawyers, from Bryan A. Garner’s Collection”, an exhibit curated by Bryan A. Garner with Mike Widener, is on display until December 16, 2013 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.