English, John C. Gray's Nature and Sources of the Law. None of these, however, touches the field covered by Dean Pound of Harvard. They expound either general principles or the contemporary situation. He unfolds the gradual development through history, of the national law.
No one could be better qualified for the task. Law in books has been ground into him by years of study, law in action by the rough and tumble of Nebraska practice. His exposition of an abstract legal theory is brought home by a remark of Huck Finn's or a racy anecdote from the "short-grass country." To this equipment is added a mastery of Roman and modern Continental law with the underlying philosophic thought, so that the unfailing ability to check one legal system by another frees him from the instinctive conviction of many jurists that their own law necessarily embodies universal human conceptions, and enables him to distinguish with a sure eye the accidental and purely historical portions of American law from those elements which are permanent and inborn.
Amid the enervated discouragement which has succeeded the overstrain of the war years, Dean Pound still retains faith in the efficacy of effort and the belief that the administration of justice may be improved by conscious, intelligent action. This faith inspired many members of the bar in the early years of the twentieth century before their valuable reforms of our law were cut short by the summons to Washington or overseas. The issue now is whether that productive attitude shall be revived or whether the work shall be left unfinished and the old confusion allowed to remain unremedied by the bar until an indignant populace takes matters into its own hands. The author forcibly points out the dangers from a recrudescence of juristic pessimism.
"At the end of the nineteenth century lawyers thought attempt at conscious improvement was futile. Now many of them think it is dangerous. In the same way the complacent nothing-needs-to-be-done attitude of Blackstone, who in the spirit of the end of a period of growth, thought the law little short of a state of perfection, was followed by the timorous juristic pessimism of Lord Eldon who feared that law reform would subvert the constitution. Not a little in the legislative reform movement which followed might have proceeded on more conservative lines if he had been willing to further needed changes instead of obstructing all change. The real
