Early American legal literature first captured my imagination shortly after I moved to Connecticut to take a position at Yale Law School in 2021. On a visit to the Tapping Reeve House and Litchfield Law School the following summer, I sat on a bench in the one-room schoolhouse that once served as the nation’s first law school. Looking up at the lectern, I thought about the thousand lawyers trained by Tapping Reeve and James Gould there between 1774 and 1833. In the corner of the room, I noticed a closet. Only later did I learn that this closet had housed America’s first academic law library: Reeve’s personal collection of law books, which he lent to his student in accordance with a set of strict circulation policies. I began to understand Litchfield Law School as a major site of legal textual transmission and production.
For the last several years, law books read or written at Lichfield Law School have been a major focus of my collecting. I am now a professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law, but early American law books continue to be a preoccupation; I am currently working on a bibliography of Chancellor Kent’s Commentaries on American Law.
Ephraim Kirby. Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut. From the Year 1785, to May, 1788; With Some Determinations in the Supreme Court of Errors. Litchfield: Printed by Collier & Adams, 1789.
Kirby’s Reports is the first fully developed volume of case law published in the United States. A Revolutionary War veteran and lawyer, Kirby identified an incongruity between the legal literature being imported from England and the realities of law practice in a new republic. In an effort to remedy this situation, he compiled the decisions of the Connecticut Superior Court. Kirby, who lived near Litchfield Law School, presented this copy to law student Stephen Twining.
Tapping Reeve. The Law of Baron and Femme; Of Parent and Child; Of Guardian and Ward; Of Master and Servant; And of the Powers of Courts of Chancery. With an Essay on the Terms, Heir, Heirs, and Heirs of the Body. New Haven: Printed by Oliver Steele, 1816.
Reeve was the founder of Litchfield Law School, a judge on the Connecticut Superior Court, and chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. The first legal treatise written in the United States, “Reeve’s Domestic Relations” is a disquisition on an archaic area of law that encompassed family law, employment law, the law of slavery, and trusts and estates. Progressive for his time, Reeve asserts that coverture and slavery are contrary to the common law.
James Gould. A Treatise on the Principles of Pleading, in Civil Actions. Boston: Lilly and Wait, 1832.
Gould was Reeve’s student, partner, and successor at Litchfield Law School. Like Reeve, Gould served as a justice on the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Published during the law school’s waning days, Gould’s treatise memorializes the pleading principles he taught his students. Later displaced by the codification of procedural rules, most notably the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, common-law pleading was the highly complex and formalistic system through which lawyers presented legal issues to courts.
