THE COMMON LAW FOR LAYMEN
The Spirit of the Common Law. By Roscoe Pound. 12mo. 224 pages. Marshall Jones Company. $2.50.
COLLEGE commencements are not ordinarily sources of intellectual inspiration. Indeed, students of anthropology might plausibly conjecture that under the guise of a return to the fountains of knowledge, university graduates are obtaining the modern equivalent of those saturnalia and bacchanalia during which the populations of antiquity sought in-complete unrestraint a welcome relief from the monotonous duties of daily life. And yet this thronging of thousands of educated men to homes of learning at the crowning season of the year affords an unmatched opportunity for a renewal of that contact with fundamental ideas for which most of us have small time in the rush of earning a livelihood. Dartmouth has seized this opportunity. Through the generosity of Mr Henry Lynn Moore, she can now persuade her alumni to remain in the cherished haunts of youth for a few days after the tumult and the shouting dies, there to replenish their intellectual reserves from the minds of leaders of thought. The lectureships founded by him mark a significant step towards some widespread continuing education by which adult Americans may adapt themselves to the perplexing problems that have arisen since they left school and college.
Law was wisely chosen for one of the opening series of Moore Lectures. Astonishingly little has been written about it in English, except for lawyers. The intelligent manufacturer, trade unionist, or farmer with a longing to understand the world about him, has been abundantly supplied with scholarly and readable books on the Old Stone Age, Einstein, the inside of the atom, the South Sea Islands, Victorian politics, Athenian drama, and the complexities of Freud. But if he is interested in the principles and growth of the system of rules which regulate the controversies and affairs of American citizens, he is largely relegated to technical treatises about as intelligible to a layman as the mathematical articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is especially undesirable in an age when taxation
