Roscoc Pound has given his last class at Harvard.

From Professor Pound's casual office in the stacks of Langdell Library, word came this term that the 76-year old legal philosopher, dean of the Law School for 20 years, would retire July 1. "It is best to retire before people begin wondering why you don't," he mused, peering over the wall of books that lines his desk on three sides.

Simultaneous with the announcement of his withdrawal from active work at the University, Professor Pound disclosed plans to return to China this summer to complete the work he began last year on he codification of Chinese law. He will leave for the Orient some time towards the close of the summer after preparatory work here at the University. "We need six weeks in the library before we can go ahead," he explained, adding that China now has no adequate library of comparative law, The Japanese spoiled such institutions during their years of military occupation.

Charles Evans Hughes said of Professor Pound on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, "He has a unique place among American scholars. By reason of his wide knowledge of legal subjects and his rare talent for exposition, he has been a brilliant teacher. His writings constitute a notable contribution to the science of jurisprudence. He has also been a close student of the practical problems of the courts and has greatly aided in promoting sound administrative measures,"

During the fall, the portly, Keen-eyed jurist carried a heavy law schedule, beside one course in he College. He grades all examinations and term papers himself. "I do not think it is fair to my students to have assistants do the work," he said. He found his first postwar class swollen, as is the rule these days, with serious-minded veterans "much better" than those before the war.

Philosophical Pioneer

Professor Pound's reputation rests on the philosophy of "sociological jurisprudence," which he conceived and pioneered. Law became for him no mere pattern of rules. The aim of the law was, he enunciated, not just stability or the ordering of individual wills. Rather it was to harmonize the conflicting interests in society through the force of an organized political structure. "We may think of the task of the legal order," Professor Pound summed up, "as one of precluding friction and eliminating waste; of conserving the goods of existence in order to make them go as far as possible."

Only a few years after slavery had been prohibited in the Nebraska Territory and with the pony express yet to be replaced by the overland telegraph, Roscoe Pound was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1870. His father was a judge; his mother, an amateur botanist.

Young Pound must have taken after this mother in his early years. Botany was his field when he took his A.B. from the University of Nebraska at the age of 17. His masters came the following year, and in 1897 he took a Ph.D. Both were in botany.

At the age of 18, he came east to study at the Harvard Law School. Pound took the freshman courses and sat in one as many others as he could.

One of the School's top men at the time, John C. Gray, chanced upon the Nebraskan in the library one afternoon, poring over Mackensie's Roman Law. Gray stopped and advised, "Don't read that." He picked a copy advised, "Don't read that." He picked a copy of the then recently published 1889 edition of Sohm's Institute from the shelves and set it down before Pound. "Read this," he admonished and walked on. Twenty years later Gray sat in Professor Pound's seminar on Roman Law.

In a letter to his parents back in Nebraska, Pound explained that studying was hardly fashionable in Cambridge. But he had found an ingenious way to maintain both caste and scholarship. "The Law School men have the reputation of working harder than the College men--and I think they probably do," he wrote. "If a College man works very hard, he is called a grind and generally looked down on.

"I probably wouldn't stand much show, if I didn't go with a College set who suppose, of course, when I am not with them that I am with the Law School fellows or at the club. I am hardly even there. But there is only one other Law School fellow there, and he is never at the library. Consequently I can work all the time, and no one knows the difference. As I room at a private house, I am not bothered with callers."

Pound left the Law School after a single year to return to Nebraska. He has never taken the LL.B in course but has received the honorary Doctor of Laws from the nation's universities better than 14 times since Michigan first awarded it to him in 1912.

Professor Pound doubled as a commissioner of appeals for Nebraska's Supreme Court and an assistant professor in her University's law school until Dean Wigmore of Northwestern offered him a position on his faculty and a chance to practice in Chicago.