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136 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1928)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0136 and id is 1 raw text is: Social and Economic Problems of the Law By RosCoE POUND Dean, Law School, Harvard University L AW has always been confronted with social problems, and in a large sense has always been confronted with economic problems. The occa- sion for law is that we have to live together in civilized society under con- ditions in which claims and demands and desires conflict or overlap, and these claims or demands or desires must be adjusted or reconciled so as to bring about a maximum of satisfaction with a minimum of friction and waste, if civilization is to be maintained, fur- thered and handed on. The problems of law are social because the legal order is a social institution, a highly special- ized form of social control. They are economic because the task of social control is one of governing human ac- tivities in the satisfaction of unlimited wants out of the limited stock of goods of existence so as to conserve those goods and make them, in a long view, go as far as possible. Two circumstances have made us newly conscious of social and economic problems as problems of the law, and have made such problems seem pecul- iarly problems of the law in this time and place. One is that we are in a period of legal transition, in the wake of social and economic transition, following upon an era of legal and so- cial and economic stability. In the era of a systematizing and ordering legal science, which went with this social and economic stability, we had come to think of the foundations of the law as fixed and of changes in law as no more than detailed new applications of old and settled principles. That mode of thought was a response to one set of social and economic problems. It is not sufficing for a new set newly press- ing. Thus it is made to appear that such problems are something new. But a second circumstance, no less efficient toward the same result, is the break with the historical and analytical jurisprudence of the immediate past which is characteristic of recent legal thought. The historical and analyti- cal jurisprudence of the last century sought to exclude all social and eco- nomic problems, as such, from the do- main of the science of law. They sought to set up a self-sufficient juris- prudence in which only authoritative legal materials, regarded as such, should come into consideration. Theyexpected to set up a critique of legal precepts, legal doctrines and legal institutions in terms of these precepts, doctrines and institutions themselves. A cri- tique of them in terms of the social and economic problems to which they are addressed has drawn attention to something with which jurists had had no concern. It has made the relation of law to such problems seem some- thing wholly new. It has made it seem that problems of the sort were confronting the law for the first time. Although the functional thinking of today with its trying of legal precepts and doctrines and institutions with reference to how, and how far, they achieve the ends of law, make it look as if the legal order had to do with social and economic problems for the first time, in truth it is but meeting new social problems and new economic problems partly by adaptations and reshapings of the received traditional

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