Connecticut Supreme Court History
Volume I (2006)

TAPPING REEVE, THE CONNECTICUT COMMON LAW, AND AMERICA’S FIRST LAW SCHOOL

Christopher Collier
Connecticut State Historian and Professor of History Emeritus, University of Connecticut

Abstract

Connecticut Supreme Court jurist Tapping Reeve, in 1784, opened the young nation’s first law school. It is no coincidence that a Connecticut jurist headed this enterprise, or that the state’s jurists generally, of all those in the original United States, produced not only the first law school  but the first treatise on American law and the first printed reports of cases aw well. Connecticut, largely because of its weak connection to the English government and its long-standing virtual autonomy, became more than any other state dependent upon a locally developed common law, in which Connecticut precedent always trumped that of the mother country. Central to the systematic articulation of that common law were the lectures of Tapping Reeve at his Litchfield law school.

Tapping Reeve was, next to Zephaniah Swift, Connecticut’s most influential jurist for an entire generation following the Revolutionary War. Reeve was appointed to the Superior Court in 1798 and remained on the judicial bench until his mandatory retirement at seventy in 1815. In what amounted to an honorific gesture, the General Assembly elevated Reeve to chief justice a few months before his seventieth birthday. However, like Swift, who succeeded him as chief justice, Reeve’s influence was extra-judicial; Swift through his writings, Reeve through his teaching.

Reeve’s influence may have been extra-judicial, but it was enormous. Large numbers of Reeve’s students came from other states; they went home. About a third of them were native to the Yankee state. Many of these also left Connecticut, locating where there was less competition and fewer formalities. Thus hundreds of Reeve-trained young men swarmed across the country during the early years of the nineteenth century. And they entered politics by the scores. By the mid-1830s, according to one calculation, although Connecticut’s population was a bit over two percent of the nation’s total, about 15 percent of the representatives in Congress had been born in Connecticut. A highly disproportionate number of them served as legislators, magistrates, and governors. Thus the nation’s first law school became the incubator of the bench and bar of one state after another, dominating America’s jurisprudence for two generations.

This essay recounts the story of Tapping Reeve, the Litchfield Law School, and the legacy of each in the context of the state’s common law heritage.

Connecticut Supreme Court History, Vol. I | Publications