Michael von der Linn, lead curator of our current exhibit, "From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782–1843," will be speaking about the exhibit on April 19 at the Litchfield Historical Society in Litchfield, Connecticut. In his talk, von der Linn will explore how Sir William Blackstone’s seminal Commentaries on the Laws of England provided a syllabus for Judge Tapping Reeve, the founder of the Litchfield Law School. He will also compare examples from Book 1 of the Commentaries with Reeve’s own radical rewriting of that book, The Law of Baron and Femme (1816), and to show how Reeve revised Blackstone for a post-Revolutionary legal community.

The talk is part of the society's "Lunch and Learn" series. The talk will begin at 12 noon on Friday, April 19, at the Litchfield History Museum, 7 South Street, Litchfield, CT. There is a $5 recommended donation for this program. Those wishing to attend are asked register by calling (860) 567-4501 or emailing <registration@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org>.

Baldwin, Simeon E. “Zephaniah Swift.” In Great American Lawyers (William Draper Lewis; ed.; Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1907-1909).

Fisher, Samuel H. Litchfield Law School 1774-1833: Biographical Catalogue of Students. Yale Law Library Publications, no. 11. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.

Forgeus, Elizabeth. “An Early Connecticut Law School: Sylvester Gilbert’s School at Hebron.” 35 Law Library Journal 200-203 (1942).

Forgeus, Elizabeth. “Sylvester Gilbert’s Law School at Hebron, Connecticut: The Students.” 39 Law Library Journal 49-52 (1946).

Hicks, Frederick C. Yale Law School: The Founders and the Founders’ Collection. Yale Law Library Publications, no. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

Hoeflich, Michael H. Legal Publishing in Antebellum America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Klafter, Craig Evan. Reason Over Precedents: Origins of American Legal Thought. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Klafter, Craig Evan. “The Americanization of Blackstone’s Commentaries.” In Essays on English Law and the American Experience (Elisabeth A. Cawthon & David E. Narrett, eds.; College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994).

Langbein, John H. “Blackstone, Litchfield, and Yale: The Founding of Yale Law School.” In A History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures (Anthony T. Kronman, ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Langbein, John H. “Law School in a University: Yale’s Distinctive Path in the Later Nineteenth Century.” In A History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures (Anthony T. Kronman, ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

The Litchfield Ledger, <http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/ledger>. A biographical database of students at the Litchfield Law School and Litchfield Female Academy, provided by the Litchfield Historical Society.

McKenna, Marian C. Tapping Reeve and the Litchfield Law School. New York: Oceana, 1986.

Reed, Alfred Zantzigner. Training for the Public Profession of the Law: Historical Development and Principal Contemporary Problems of Legal Education in the United States, with Some Account of Conditions in England and Canada. New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons, 1921.

White, G. Edward. “Law and Entrepreneurship.” In White, Law in American History, Volume 1: From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

The image: Zephaniah Swift, A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut, vol. 1 (Windham: Printed by John Byrne, for the author, 1795-1796). Ownership signature of Samuel W. Southmayd (1773-1813), a student at the Litchfield Law School in 1793. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

In Connecticut and elsewhere, instructors in the proprietary schools played a crucial and self-conscious role in the Americanization of the common law. Applying practical experience, political beliefs, and the ideology of the American Revolution, they revised it to suit local circumstances and showed where it was incorrect, obsolete, or irrelevant. This is especially evident in their reception of Blackstone’s Commentaries. On a fundamental level they helped to de-Anglicize the law by teaching the positive and case law of their state.

Instructors in the Connecticut schools played a dominant role in this process, training dozens of men who became influential lawyers, judges, legislators, and teachers. Litchfield’s alumni list, our largest and most distinguished example, includes two vice-presidents, 101 United States congressmen, twenty-eight United States senators, six cabinet members, three United States Supreme Court justices, fourteen governors, thirteen chief justices of state supreme courts, and seventeen members of the Connecticut House of Representatives. Reeve, Gould, and Swift’s widely circulated treatises, all published versions of their lectures, were equally influential.

Benjamin Pomeroy (1787-1855), Manuscript notes of lectures by Sylvester Gilbert at his Law School in Hebron, Connecticut (c. 1811). [Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Instructors in the Connecticut schools rejected Blackstone’s unquestioned reverence for the common law. As we see in this lecture by Gilbert, they often subjected his doctrines to counterexamples drawn from natural, civil, and Roman law.

Tapping Reeve, The Law of Baron and Femme (New-Haven: Oliver Steele, 1816). [Image cropped.] Ownership signature of Isaac Leavenworth (1791-1864), a student at the New Haven Law School in 1822. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The first American treatise on family law, Reeve’s Law of Baron and Femme is a restatement of Blackstone’s Commentaries, Book I, Chapters XIV-XVII. It rejects some of the fundamental doctrines of the common law, most notably coverture. As Blackstone puts it, “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage.” Reeve says the opposite. Also a prescriptive work, Baron and Femme aimed to liberalize the American law of domestic relations, arguing, for example, that married women were permitted to make wills, a point contradicted by the contemporary statute and case law of Connecticut and several other states.

Zephaniah Swift, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Connecticut (New-Haven: Printed and published by S. Converse, 1822-1823).
[Image cropped.] Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Zephaniah Swift’s System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut, the first original American legal treatise, was highly regarded throughout the United States. Published on a subscription basis, its subscribers included George Washington, John Adams, Aaron Burr, James Kent, James Madison and other notables. Structured in the manner of Blackstone’s Commentaries, it presented an overview of the common law of Connecticut, and the common law generally, based on local court decisions and legislation. Swift’s Digest, a more ambitious work, is a complete recasting of the Commentaries. Though it referred to Connecticut law, the Digest addressed American law generally and was intended for a national audience. Both works were deeply influential and are still cited today.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) was based on a course of undergraduate lectures that Blackstone delivered at Oxford University. Intended for future members of England’s ruling class, it was the first truly comprehensive synopsis of the common law and its underlying principles. Attractively written, it was soon adopted by aspiring lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Blackstone’s Commentaries was especially popular in America. Members of the legal elite cited its origins to promote the establishment of law schools. Students used it for self-guided study or background reading. Instructors used it as a syllabus. In a letter to a prospective Yale law student dated Dec. 9, 1831, for example, Daggett says that “Blackstones Com. are the outlines & I endeavor to fill up certain of his topics such as mortgages, evidence, pleadings, contracts, equity &c. &c.”

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1 (Portland [Maine]: Thomas B. Wait, & Co., 1807). Armorial bookplate, “Doggett Daggett,” which is the family of Yale law professor David Daggett. William Blackstone Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Notebook of Charles Adams (1795-1821) from lectures of Tapping Reeve and James Gould at the Litchfield Law School, June-Aug. 1812. Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

The Connecticut law schools were devoted almost exclusively to private law, then the purview of elite lawyers, which is covered in the first three volumes. The first citation in the right margin, "1 B_ 426", is to Blackstone's Commentaries, volume 1, page 426.

-- Notes by Michael von der Linn

"From Litchfield to Yale: Law Schools in Connecticut, 1782-1843," curated by Michael von der Linn and Michael Widener, is on display through May 30, 2013, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Here are a few of the highlights from our acquisitions in the past three months.

For our growing collection of illustrated law books:

• Quadruvium ecclesie (Paris, 1509) by Johann Hugonis de Sletstat (a.k.a. Johann Hug), considered the first text on German constitutional law; only one other copy in the U.S. (Robbins Collection). See the image at right.
  
• The first edition in German of Damhoudere’s Praxis rerum criminalium (Frankfurt, 1565), a standard work on the criminal law of northern Europe with woodcuts illustrating crimes and criminal procedure; the only U.S. copy.
• Juristische Ergötzlichkeiten vom Jungfrauen-Rechte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1715) bound with Juristische Ergötzlichkeiten vom Jung-Gesellen Rechte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1723), a pair of little books on law for young women and young men, respectively, with charming frontispieces; the only U.S. copies.
• Two standard works, Justinian’s Institutes (1516) and the Liber Sextus (1514) in lovely editions published by the Giunta family in Venice, with dozens of woodcut illustrations. They join an illustrated Giunta edition of the Decretals (1514) we acquired 60 years ago.
• Esdaile’s Temple Church Monuments (London, 1933) showing the tombs of Edmund Plowden and John Selden.
• Jesse Turner’s A Page from the English State Trials (1907?) extra-illustrated with 55 plates.
• Several 19th-century trials adorned with portraits of the accused and/or their victims.
• Fire on the Nunnery Grounds (2000), a graphic novel based on the the arson attack on the Ursuline Convent in Boston. We also obtained The Charlestown Convent: Its Destruction by a Mob, on the Night of August 11, 1834 (Boston, 1870), an account of the attack and the trials that followed.

We have acquired several law-related children’s books to join the Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection donated by Professor Morris L. Cohen, including:

• Jehoshaphat Aspin, The Constitution of England, or, Magna-Charta, Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, and All the Other Laws of England: Familiarly Explained for the Instruction of Youth; Illustrated with an Analytical Chart of the Government of Great Britain, Elegantly Coloured (London, 1810).
• Cruel Jim: and Other Stories (Philadelphia, 1869), a cautionary tale of how cruel children grow into career criminals.
• The Tragi-comic History of the Burial of Cock Robin: with The Lamentation of Jenny Wren; The Sparrow's Apprehension; and The Cuckoo's Punishment (Philadelphia, 1811); printed by John Bouvier, author of the first American law dictionary.

The American Trials Collection grew by 28 titles, including:

• Several trials featuring female victims: The Authentic Life of Mrs. Mary Ann Bickford (Boston, 1846); Lizzie Nutt's Sad Experience (Philadelphia, 1886), Myron Buel, the Murderer of Catharine Mary Richards (Binghamton, NY, 1879), Poor Mary Pomeroy! (Philadelphia, 1874), Trial for Libel: Susanna Torrey, Plaintiff (Fayetteville, VT, 1835), Confession of John Joyce: Who Was Executed on Monday, the 14th of March 1808, for the Murder of Mrs. Sarah Cross, with an Address to the Public and People of Colour (Philadelphia, 1808).
• A Report of the Trial, of James Sylvanus M'Clean (Philadelphia, 1812), an early use of the insanity plea, involving an extortion attempt against Stephen Girard, the wealthiest American of his time.
• More murder trials: Cluverius: My Life, Trial and Conviction (Richmond, 1887); Report of the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan for the Murder of Marcus Lyon (Northampton, MA, 1806); Confession of Jesse Strang (Albany, 1827); Report of the Trials of the Murderers of Richard Jennings (Newburgh, NY, 1819); Trial of John Schild (1813).
• And... a small collection of manuscript court documents and transcripts relating to the trial of William Fitzgerald, accused of murdering a Shawnee Indian in Indiana Territory in 1802.

Additions to our William Blackstone Collection included:

• Blackstone’s Letter to the author of The Question stated (London, 1769), his contribution to the debate over the John Wilkes election.
• Outlines of the Jurisdiction of All the Courts in England and Wales by R. Maugham (London, 1838), a work closely tied to the Commentaries.
• The first edition of The Comic Blackstone (London, 1844-46) in two parts.

And a few odds & ends:

• The first edition of Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries (London, 1571), the first and for centuries the finest of the nominative reports.
• Statuti della Honoranda università de mercatanti ... di Bologna (1550), with a vellum musical manuscript used in the binding; the only U.S. copy.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian