By Thomas
R. Bayles
Tapping Reeve
Tapping Reeve was
born in Brookhaven in October 1744, and was the son of the Rev.
Abner Reeve, minister of the south Haven Presbyterian Church for
several years.
He graduated from Princeton in 1763
and in 1771 moved to Litchfield, Conn., and began the practice of
law. Judge Reeves was the first lawyer to give young men a regular
course and complete legal education with lectures. He founded at
Litchfield the first law school in the United States, which he
conducted alone until 1798, when he took in James Gould, and the two
men constituted the faculty until Judge Reeve retired in 1820. He
was also judge of the Connecticut Superior Court from 1798 to 1814,
and was the author of several important law books.
Judge Gould, his fellow teacher was
born in Branford, Conn., in 1770. His lectures on pleading were
revised by him and published, and this classic placed him among the
very best legal writers of those years.
These two great lawyers, who were
the first founders of a national law school in America, and laid one
of the cornerstones in the foundation of true American patriotism,
loyalty to the law.
In 1820, when Judge Reeve retired,
J.W. Huntington became associated with his partner Judge Gould, and
they continued the law school until 1833, when it was given up.
Between 1784 and 1798 there were
210 students in attendance; from 1798 to 1812, 264 students, and
after that date 550 students.
Many of the students attained high
positions: 16 became United States senators, five Cabinet officers,
eight chief justices of states, two were chief justices of the
United States Supreme Court, 10 were state governors, 50 members of
Congress and 40 judges of state supreme courts.
No catalog of the school was
published until 1798, and the course was one of 14 months, with
tuition $100 the first year and $60 the second year.