Roscoe Pound (1870-1964) was home-schooled until he went to Harvard, to study botany, but also ended up studying law. Pound was a prominent botanist as well as a jurist, and spent his early years in Nebraska practicing and teaching law, simultaneously serving as director of the state botanical survey (1892-1903). Pound was then professor of law at Harvard (1910-37) and dean of the law school (1916-36), where he introduced many reforms. He advanced the theory of social interests in law, and a doctrine called “sociological jurisprudence”.
In 1930 and 1931, while Dean of Harvard Law School, he carried on a law review article debate with Karl Llewellyn, a law professor at Columbia Law School. Thus, while Pound was not a Realist himself, he did more than most Realists to help define and bring attention to Legal Realism.
Pound influenced other famous American jurists, such as Benjamin Cardozo and Louis D. Brandeis. For the case of Muller v. Oregon,208 U.S. 412 (1908), Brandeis had put Dean Pound’s theories into practice with the “Brandeis Brief” (a brief giving factual support for the statute in question, rather than mere legal argument).
Pound’s books on jurisprudence include Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1922), Criminal Justice in America (1930), Contemporary Juristic Theory (1940), and Social Control through Law (1942).