Roscoe Pound, Melvin Belli, and the Personal-Injury Bar: The Tale of an Odd Coupling

In the fourth chapter of Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, legal historian John Fabian Witt tells the story of a collaboration between storied scholar Roscoe Pound and trial virtuoso Melvin M. Belli, which he calls among the most startling and yet unremarked-upon relationships in the annals of American law. Witt argues that it both shaped and energized the efforts of personal-injury lawyers to oppose proposals that would shift to the administrative branch of government responsibility for compensating auto-accident victims. Entitled The King and the Dean, in reference to the media\u27s coronation of Belli as the King of Torts , and Pound\u27s lengthy term (1916-1936) at the helm of the Harvard Law School, the chapter advances the claim that the two men came together synergistically in the early 1950s and mobilized a campaign by personal-injury lawyers to resist the enactment of automobile no-fault plans and other proposals that would have replaced common-law tort suits with alternative compensation mechanisms. This Article will first take issue with Witt\u27s story of the Pound-Belli relationship and then offer a different version of the interaction between the Dean and the plaintiffs\u27 trial bar