THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FACTOR IN LEGAL INTERPRETATION

Authors

Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law SchoolFollow

Abstract

We may think of the task of the legal order as one of maintaining the inner order of a politically organized society. The term "law" is not uncommonly used to include the task and the agencies by which we endeavor to achieve it. Thus it is used (as by sociologists and by the historical jurists) for all social control, and, by those who limit the term to a highly specialized social control through politically organized society, for (1) the legal order, the regime of adjusting relations and ordering conduct by systematic employment of the force of a state (the type of social control which has become paramount since the sixteenth century) ; (2) the body of authoritative or received grounds of or guides to determination by which judges and administrative officials are expected to and on the whole do carry on their task of adjusting relations and ordering conduct through deciding disputes; and (3) the judicial and administrative processes. Interpretation, as the term is commonly used, refers to finding grounds of decision in law in the second sense and applying them in law in the third sense.

Recommended Citation

Roscoe Pound, THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FACTOR IN LEGAL INTERPRETATION, 45 Mich. L. Rev. 599 (1947).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol45/iss5/4