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Roscoe Pound is considered to be the founder of American sociological jurisprudence. His works include:

1. The Spirit of Common Law
2. Interpretation of Legal History
3. The Formative Era of American Law
4. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law
5. Law and Morals
6. Social Control through Law
7. Law and Morals
8. The Task of Law

According to Roscoe Pound, the main features of the sociological school of jurisprudence are:

1. It emphasises the functional aspect of law and not its abstract contents.
2. It treats law as a social institution which is closely related to various other disciplines that have a direct impact on society.
3. It believes that human experience is the basis of law and that law is designed to meet dynamic social needs. (This is contrary to the emphases placed on ‘command’ by analytical positivism and on the past by the historical school of jurisprudence.)
4. It either adopts a pragmatic approach by treating law as an applied science which uses functional methods to investigate, analyse and solve social problems or else, it adopts a realistic approach and defines law primarily in terms of judicial precedents.

His theory is called the Theory of Social Engineering.

Law
Pound defined law as ‘the rules principles, conceptions and standards of conduct and decision and also the precepts and doctrine of professional rules of art’. The aim of law is:
1. to satisfy as many wants as possible while causing as little friction or confrontation as can be caused.
2. to reconcile the aims, wants and demands of the individual with those of society
3. to bring harmony into the relationship between the individual and society.

He called this satisfaction of social aims, wants and demands with the least possible sacrifice ‘social engineering’. He went on to say that the members of the judiciary, legislators, administrators and jurists must make a planned and coordinated effort to maintain a balance between the completing interests in society which he classified into three main categories: private, public and social.

Private Interests include physical integrity, freedom of volition, freedom of conscience safeguarded by the law of crime, tort, contract and constitutional law, domestic relationships, etc. Public interests include the preservation of the State and social interests include the preservation of social institutions such as religion, the prevention of prostitution and the conservation of Social Resources such as forests.

The classification is not watertight; Julius Stone has, in fact, said that public interests are social interests.

Pound evaluated these interests with reference to certain basic assumptions which he said exist in every society. He called these assumptions the ‘jural postulates’ of the legal system in question and specifically mentioned five of them which exist as guidelines for civilised life in every civilised society by saying that men in such societies must be able to assume that:

“1. others will commit no intentional aggressions upon them.

2. they may control for beneficial purposes what they have discovered and appropriated to their own use, what they have created by their own labor, and what they have acquired under the existing social and economic order.

3. those with whom they deal in the general intercourse of society will act in good faith and hence:

(i) Will make good reasonable expectations which their promises or other conduct will reasonably create;

(ii) Will carry out their undertakings according to the expectations which the moral sentiment of the community attaches thereto;

(iii) Will restore specifically or by equivalent what comes to them by mistake or unanticipated or (via a) not fully intended situation whereby they receive at another’s expense what they could not reasonably have expected to receive under the circumstances.

4. those who are engaged in some course of conduct will act with due care not to cause an unreasonable risk of injury upon others.

5. those who maintain things likely to get out of hand or to escape and do damage will restrain them or keep them within their proper bounds.”

However, Pound also acknowledged that the jural postulates are dynamic; they are merely of relative value and are not absolute.

Criticism of Roscoe Pound’s Theory

1. Social Engineering: By using the term ‘social engineering’, Roscoe Pound compared society to a machine ignoring its dynamic and non-mechanistic nature.

2. Jural Postulates: They fail to establish any framework of reference or yardstick with which to evaluate various interests since they themselves are not static.

3. The Interests: They overlap and cannot be easily fit into neat little pigeon holes.

4. The Balance: Roscoe’s emphasis on securing the maximum satisfaction of needs, wants and demands has the inherent danger of this satisfaction being at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.

References: Salmond on Jurisprudence, Bodenheimer, Roscoe Pound, Social Control Through the Law, (the Powell Lectures) etc.