The Litchfield Law School

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“On a broad shaded street in one of the most beautiful of New England villages, stands an attractive old Colonial house, the residence, at the close of the American Revolution, of a Connecticut lawyer. Hard by the house was the owner's law office, a small one-story wooden building much resembling the familiar district schoolhouse. There was nothing about it to catch the eye, but it has a peculiar interest for the lawyer, as the birthplace of the American Law School. For it was to this building that young men came from all parts of the country, to listen to the lectures of Judge Reeve, the founder of the celebrated Litchfield Law School…The private law school at Litchfield had for nearly twenty-five years no competitor, and throughout the fifty years of its existence was the only school that could claim a national character.” -- James Barr Ames, Dean of the Harvard Law School at the dedication of the new Law School Building of the University of Pennsylvania, February, 1900. "Just a year after the American Revolution ended, a lawyer named Tapping Reeve built a small schoolhouse next to his home in Litchfield, Connecticut. The Litchfield Law School was arguably the United States' first. Paul DeForest Hicks leaves no doubt that it was the most important law school before the Civil War. This gracefully written book tells the story of this tiny institution with national reach through the experiences of its alumni. Hicks finds Litchfield students seemingly everywhere in the young nation, and convincingly shows how they influenced the development of American politics, proslavery and antislavery ideas, capitalism, and law." -- Mark Boonshoft, Professor of History, Norwich University