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Known to his successors as a giant of American law, Roscoe Pound was a distinctive scholar and educator who led his career by the maxim, “The law must be stable, but it must not stand still.” Pound was an unlikely individual to make such movement throughout the history of American law: rather than law, his career started in academics and the natural sciences. The intersection of his work in botany, social sciences, and jurisprudence set the stage for an unusual legal career. Interdisciplinarity became the cornerstone of his momentous contributions to the theory and practice of law. Pound’s work matched the diversity of his disciplinary interests. He researched, analyzed, and published on the relationship between society, its representations of crime, and the effects this had on criminal justice and administration. He was dedicated to improving court administration and proposed radical reforms that, over time, became increasingly conservative as he separated from President Theodore Roosevelt’s ideologies.

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