DWIGHT, THEODORE WILLIAM (182 ), Amer ican jurist and educator, cousin of Theodore Dwight Woolsey and of Timothy Dwight, was born July 18, 1822, in Catskill, New York. He graduated at Hamilton college in 184o and studied law for one year at Yale. After tutoring at Hamilton and teaching law privately he was made Maynard professor of law, history, civil polity, and political economy in 1846; and in 1858 accepted an invitation to Columbia to teach law upon his own condition that he should found a law school. For many years he himself was the school and did not retire from it until about a year before his death, in Clinton (N.Y.), on June 28, 1892.
A man of broad culture, he used the Socratic method of teach ing. For several years he was a non-resident professor of law at Cornell and at Amherst. An able jurist, he frequently acted as referee in difficult questions and engaged in other legal and judicial work. He was a prominent figure in political and social (notably prison) reforms. He published in 1867 a Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada (with E. C. Wines) ; favoured indeterminate sentences; drew up the bill for the establishment of the Elmira Reformatory, and organized the State Charities Aid Association. He edited Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1864) ; was associate editor of the American Law Register and legal editor of Johnson's Cyclopaedia, and published Charitable Uses: Argument in the Rose Will Case (1863).