Roscoe Pound and the Social Engineering Theory:1

Social Engineering: 

In America, the law school and the jurist enjoy a status superior to that of their counterparts in Great Britain. These factors have combined to produce an American movement in sociological jurisprudence lead by Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School. “The aim of Social Engineering is to build an efficient structure of the society as far as possible which involves the balancing of competing interests.” said Pound.

Functional approach to Law:

Pound’s approach was for a functional approach to law. Also, his approach harmonizes with that of the utilitarian school which propounds the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. All he was mostly concerned about was the need for the legal order to influence societal needs so that the law would not appear foreign or alien to the people. He was, therefore, desirous of bridging the gap between the law in textbooks and the law in action.

In any case, lists of interests are only the products of personal opinion. Different writers have presented them differently. As Pound himself says, in most cases it is preferable to transfer individual interests on to the plane of social interests when considering them. It is the ideal with reference to which any interest is considered that matters, not so much the interest itself.

Pound concentrates more on the functional aspect of law, that is why some writers name his approach as ‘functional school’. For Pound, the law is an ordering of conduct so as to make the goods of existence and the means of satisfying claims go round as far as possible with the least friction and waste. According to him, the end of law should be to satisfy a maximum of wants with a minimum of friction.