Defunct Litchfield Law School held prominent role in Supreme Court’s history

As home of the top-ranked Yale Law School, Connecticut has long been known as a destination for ambitious students hoping to one day reach the pinnacle of the American legal system: The Supreme Court.

Even before Yale accepted its first law students in the early 1800s, however, another Connecticut institution was known for churning out future justices: the Litchfield School of Law.

As President Joe Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, some have questioned whether Yale and other Ivy League alumni deserve the near monopoly they have on appointments to the most coveted judicial appointments.

That discussion has brought a renewed relevance to Litchfield’s place in the history of the Supreme Court and the development of the American legal system.

The Ivy League can boast having the most alumni to serve on the Supreme Court, with Harvard (21), Yale (11) and Columbia (7) holding the top-three spots in the country.

Litchfield — which operated from 1774 to 1833 — is tied for fourth place, along with the University of Michigan

Law School. Three alums from each school are among the 115 people to have served on the Supreme Court.

The school was officially known as the Tapping Reeve House and Law School after its founder, the Princetoneducated teacher and attorney, Tapping Reeve.

Reeve’s first student, Aaron Burr, went on to become vice president of the United States, but perhaps today is more well-known for killing Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel.

In Colonial America, prospective lawyers studied law as part of an apprenticeship with an experienced attorney that typically lasted five years.

Reeve’s school was the first formal law school in America when it opened in 1774.

After the Revolutionary War, Reeve’s school grew more popular and drew students from all over the fledgling country, as well as from Canada and British Colonies in the West Indies.

“Reeve was, I think, a born teacher so he sort of morphed the legal education from the apprenticeship system, which was the normal way, to developing a series of lectures,” said Catherine Fields, the director of the Litchfield Historical Society. “Because of the lectures, students just kept coming.”

By 1800, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. Congress had attended the Reeve’s law school, according to alumni records gathered by the Litchfield Historical Society.

“These guys had their hands in everything that happened in this country between 1800 and 1860, and there was a lot going on in those years,” Fields said. “They were on both sides of the Civil War, they dealt with Western expansion, they dealt with the rise of industry, they were truly involved in everything.”

In 1797, Henry Baldwin graduated from Yale and came to Litchfield to study law under Reeve. He later became the first Supreme Court justice to formally attend a law school.

Baldwin was appointed to the court in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson and was known to rule often on the side of slavery, though he claimed to personally “abor” the institution. He was the only justice on the court to rule against the captive Africans in the case United States v. The Amistad.

Another future Supreme Court Justice, Levi Woodbury, studied briefly at Litchfield in 1809.

Woodbury earned the moniker “baby” judge when he was appointed to the New Hampshire judiciary at age 27, but went on to serve as governor of the state as well as U.S. senator, Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of the Navy. He was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1845 and served until 1851.

The last justice to attend law school in Litchfield, Ward Hunt, studied there in 1830, several years after Reeve’s death.