Whether or no acceptance he accorded to the view of that eminent American jurist and legal educator, Judge Simeon E. Baldwin, that the unsystematic texture of the common law was less friendly to its pursuit as a scholastic exercise, acquiescence must be full and unre served in his conclusion that the absence of English law schools in modern times left Amer ica no guide in this direction; and that, great as seems the present measure of her success, whatever our country has done she has done for herself, slowly, painfully, with hesitating and uncertain step.
To Tapping Reeve, lawyer, judge and legal writer of eminent distinction, belongs the honor of establishing the first American law school, at Litchfield, Conn., in 1784. Judge Reeve, a graduate of Princeton in the class of 1763, had settled in the practice of law at Litchfield as early as 1772, and had married a sister of Aaron Burr, who was an early student of law under him and an inmate of his household. Under the able guidance of its founder, who remained its sole instructor until his elevation to the judgeship of the Superior Court of Connecticut, in 1798, the Litchfield Law School speedily gained a widespread and favorable reputation. Upon his assumption of the duties of the bench, Judge Reeve associated with himself in the con duct of the school, James Gould, the well-known legal author and jurist. The Litchfield school, though, as has been said, never conferring a degree, maintained a successful career for a round half century, and during its existence numbered more than 1,000 students upon its rolls. Of its thousand alumni, some 40 rose 'to be justices of courts of last resort in the States of their various residences, while others reached• positions of eminence as legislators in both houses of Congress. To the experience of its founder and his colleague in this pioneer school, American students and practitioners of law unquestionably owe the production of two valuable and important textbooks, each of which for more than half a century remained a stand ard of authority in its line. These were Judge Reeve's treatise on the
of Baron and Feme; Parent and Child; Guardian and Ward> (1816), familiarly known as "Reeve on Domestic Relations)); and Judge Gould's mas terly- work on
Coming now to the question of the estab lishment of regular academic courses of instruc tion in law in ,publicly chartered institutions, while a professorship in English law had been established, largely through the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, in the ancient College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1782, the earliest course of collegiate law lectures ever given in America was that delivered in 1790 by Justice James Wilson of the Supreme Court of the United States, as incumbent of the chair of law in the College of Philadelphia, the institu tion founded by Benjamin Franklin, and merged in 1792 in the University of Pennsylvania.
Auspicious circumstances attended this opening of American collegiate instruction in law, the lecturer being not only one of the best read and most deeply learned lawyers of his time, but, by reason of his distinguished record as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a van-leader of public thought and action. In deference, we may suppose, to his high dig nity as a member of the Federal judiciary, his introductory lecture on 15 Dec. 1790, was at tended by a brilliant concourse of public officials, including the President of the United States and his Cabinet, as well as the governor of Pennsylvania, members of Congress and of the State legislature. But the course, or rather series, for Judge Wilson delivered three courses of lectures during that academic year, ended with its close; and no further instruction in the subject was attempted in the University of Pennsylvania until 1817, when law lectures were once more given during the period of a single year ; following which came another interval of total inactivity in that institution lasting until 1850.
In New York, the history of academic legal instruction began with the appointment of James Kent, in 1793, to a professorship of law in Columbia College, his first course of lectures being delivered to a small class, during the following year, and succeeding courses in 1795 and 1797. Owing to the slight attendance, how ever, he resigned the chair in 1798, upon his accession to the bench of the Supreme Court of New York, of which he became chief justice in 1804. In 1823, at the age of 60, having served in the previous year as a member of the convention to revise the State constitution, and having been chancellor of New York since 1814, he retired from the bench and was re elected to his former chair at Columbia. The incalculably valuable service which he had ren dered to the cause of American jurisprudence and especially to the administration, develop ment and extension of equitable jurisdiction, he now supplemented by elaborating his learned and lucid lectures into those incomparable com mentaries on American law in four volumes (1826-30), which for more than three-quarters of a century have remained for the lawyers of our country as solid and standard an authority of reference as were the works of Coke and Blackstone to English practitioners. Attend ance upon the chancellor's lectures appears, however, to have been perfectly vountary with the student body, no regular law course being prescribed, no examinations on the subject being held and no degrees in law conferred. In point of fact, no department of law appears to have been regularly organized at Columbia until 1858; and it seems that prior thereto no law school existed in New York city.