Dean Roscoe Pound, L. '90, has sounded the opening gun of the campaign which beings today for $5,000,000 for the development of the Law School. The University, taking note of the national feeling of dissatisfaction with the existing country-wide lawlessness, has proposed the establishment of five research professorships. The men chosen for these chairs will conduct a thorough inquiry into the whole field of American Law.

An endowment of $1,000,000 is asked for the founding of these chairs and the remaining $4,000,000 will be divided between the improvement of existing buildings and bibliography and the further endowment of existing professorships and new fellowships. The budget calls for the extension and completion of Langdell Hall, the work to cost $1,250,000, and the construction of an administration building on the site of Gannett House, and a building to contain an auditorium and rooms for moot arguments, perhaps north of the extension of Langdell Hall.

Only Minimum Requirements Set

Presenting the record of its past the Law School goes before the country with the proposal that the work of the past shall be continued and made even more valuable in the future. The needs of the Law School are even greater than the demands of the present campaign would indicate, but the minimum required has been asked for. If the school is to carry on according to the calibre of its past achievements it must have these funds, and the country, if it is to see a solution of its present legal tangle, must be provided with the findings of some such research. This is the form of the appeal which Dean Pound has made to public-spirited citizens.

The funds to be requested do not contemplate provision for a larger school. What is contemplated is adequate physical provision for the present number of students, but above all else an increased number of professors and greatly increased facilities for teaching and research.

Excerpts from Dean Pound's statement follow: "What research has done for the prevention and cure of disease, what it has done for engineering, and what it has done for the technical arts, it may well do for the law. The call for research in law is especially strong. Lawyers, courts, legislatures, the administration of justice in general, and the administration of criminal justice in particular, are subjects of serious crit- icism on the part of the lay public. The strain upon law due to the changes in modern life, and the resulting delays, uncertainties and miscarriages demand a service from legal scholars in national law schools that can be performed by no one else.

Criminal Law is Weakest Link

"One subject in which research is needed is criminal law, admittedly the weakest point in our polity. No subject of research affords greater possibilities. But the administration of criminal justice is involved, in part at least, in a wider problem of enforcement of law, in which research is urgently called for. One side of law enforcement has become of especial importance to the country, namely, application of law by administrative boards and commissions.

"If a generation ago it could be said with some truth that we were a judge-ridden people, it may be said with more truth today that we are a commission-ridden people. The characteristic institutions of our inherited common law are affected profoundly by the revival of personal government which goes along with this era of administrative commissions.

"In particular, the common-law doctrine of drawing principles from the judicial experience of the past to decide the controversies of the present is threatened by administrative methods which treat all questions concretely as particular questions, not as illustrations of some general principle; which regard administrative action as a unique series of independent acts.

Law School Not Merely Trains Lawyers

"Bar associations are accomplishing much. But they can do no more than organize the efforts of practising lawyers, and are subject to the same limitations. Nor can judges do much for us. The dockets of courts are too heavy. The view of the problems of justice which any court may get is too fragmentary, and its experience is too specialized or too local to make it possible for courts to do for our time the sort of thing they did so well in the formative era of American legal institutions.

"American law schools can render a real service, not merely to the profession, but to the economic and business interests of the country, and to every citizen by carrying on the scientific investigation on which the law reforms of the future must go forward.

"Harvard Law School is not merely an institution to train practising lawyers. It has long been an institution for the advancement of justice according to law through training those who will have to do with the administration of justice in such a way as to make their work effective for justice, not merely a means of livelihood....

Believes in Social Control by Reason