f he is a lawyer, he will very likely have been able to do no
more than attempt none too intelligently to work with the complicated
and delicate engines of others upon the toughest and most resistant
of legal materials. Until some Anglo-American jurist arises with
the universal equipment of Josef Kohler the results of common-law
incursions into philosophy will resemble the effort of the editorial
writer who wrote upon Chinese Metaphysics after reading in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica under China and Metaphysics and combining
his information. Yet such incursions there must be. Philosophy has
been a powerful instrument in the legal armory and the times are ripe
for restoring it to its old place therein. At least one may show what
philosophy has done for some of the chief problems of the science of
law, what stands before us to be done in some of the more conspicuous
problems of that science today in which philosophy may help us, and
how it is possible to look at those problems philosophically without
treating them in terms of the eighteenth-century natural law or the
nineteenth-century metaphysical jurisprudence which stand for
philosophy in the general understanding of lawyers.

ROSCOE POUND.

Harvard Law School,

October 25, 1921.

Contents

I. The Function of Legal Philosophy 15
II. The End of Law 59
III. The Application of Law 100
IV. Liability 144
V. Property 191
VI. Contract 236
Bibliography 285
Index 309

I

The Function of Legal Philosophy

For twenty-four hundred years--from the Greek thinkers of the fifth
century B. C., who asked whether right was right by nature or only by
enactment and convention, to the social philosophers of today, who
seek the ends, the ethical basis and the enduring principles of social
control--the philosophy of law has taken a leading role in all
study of human institutions. The perennial struggle of American
administrative law with nineteenth-century constitutional formulations
of Aristotle's threefold classification of governmental power