Monday, April 9, 2007
Hamline University Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota is hosting a symposium this Friday on A 21st Century Vision for Law as a Profession: 100 Year After Roscoe Pound’s Call for Change in the Administration of Justice. The idea is to talk about the current state of civil litigation and the legal profession in light of the famous speech Pound delivered a century ago in St. Paul, "The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice." I'm giving a presentation called "Roscoe Pound, Popular Dissatisfaction, and Modern Mass Litigation." I am enjoying the opportunity to think in modern terms about some of the problems Pound identified in 1906, such as the inefficiencies of concurrent jurisdiction, partisan expert witnesses, press reporting on litigation as if it were a sporting event, the effect on public attitudes about law when lawyers and judges treat litigation as a game, and the friction between the individualism of the common law and the collectivism of modern society.