Précis: Roscoe Pound’s 1908 essay “Mechanical Jurisprudence” is a classic of American legal theory. Often interpreted in terms of the opposition between conservative, nineteenth-century formalism and early twentieth-century progressive sociological jurisprudence, Pound’s essay in fact contains a surprising set of teachings about the relations between science, law, and life. In this talk, I shall review these teachings and consider their relevance to jurisprudence today.

About the speaker:

Adam Sitze is the John E. Kirkpatrick 1951 Professor in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College. He teaches courses on law and literature, legal and critical theory, and South African legal history. He has published in journals such as The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, The London Review of International Law, Law and Critique, and Law, Culture and the Humanities. He is author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (University of Michigan Press, 2013). He is editor of two books by the Italian political theorist Carlo Galli: Political Spaces and Global War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Janus’s Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt (Duke University Press, 2015). He is co-editor of Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2013) and co-translator of two books by the Italian feminist theorist Adriana Cavarero: Thou Shalt Not Kill (Fordham University Press, 2015) and Inclinations: Critique of Rectitude (Stanford University Press, 2016). He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the ACLS/SSRC/NEH, and the MacArthur Foundation. In the Spring of 2022, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.