ABSTRACT
The quest for responsive law has been a continuing preoccupation of modern legal theory. As Jerome Frank noted, a key purpose of the legal realists was to make law “more responsive to social needs.” 1 To this end, they urged a broadening of “the field of the legally relevant,” 2 so that legal reasoning could embrace knowledge of the social contexts and effects of official action. Like legal realism, sociological jurisprudence aimed at enabling legal institutions “to take more complete and intelligent account of the social facts upon which law must proceed and to which it is to be applied.” 3 Pound’s theory of social interests was a more explicit effort to develop a model of responsive law. In this perspective good law should 74offer something more than procedural justice. It should be competent as well as fair; it should help define the public interest and be committed to the achievement of substantive justice.
