"[11] While Pound was dean, law school registration almost doubled, but his standards were so rigorous that one-third of those matriculated did not receive degrees.

[12] In 1929 President Herbert Hoover appointed Pound as one of the eleven primary members of the Wickersham Commission on issues relating to law enforcement, criminal activity, police brutality, and Prohibition.

[12] In 1937, however, Pound turned against the New Deal and the Legal Realism movement altogether after Roosevelt proposed packing the federal courts and bringing independent agencies into the executive branch.

[12][14] Other factors contributing to this "lurking conservatism" within Pound included bitter battles with liberals on the Harvard law faculty, the death of his wife, and a sharp exchange with Karl Llewellyn.

[12][16] In 1937 Pound resigned as Dean of Harvard Law School to become a University Professor[12] and soon became a leading critic of the legal realists.

[12] In 1934 Pound received an honorary degree from the University of Berlin, presented by the German ambassador to the United States.

[18] In the 1940s, Pound was apparently favourably disposed to replacing John P. Higgins as a judge on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was conducting a war crimes trial in Tokyo, though an appointment did not eventuate.

In 1922 Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter undertook a detailed quantitative study of crime reporting in Cleveland newspapers for the month of January 1919, using column inch counts.

They concluded that although the city's much publicized "crime wave" was largely fictitious and manufactured by the press, the coverage had a very real consequence for the administration of criminal justice.

The agencies, wishing to retain public support, complied, caring "more to satisfy popular demand than to be observant of the tried process of law."

According to Pound, a lawmaker acts as a social engineer by attempting to solve problems in society using law as a tool.