Tapping Reeve Law School
Out of his home on South Street, attorney Tapping Reeve developed the first curriculum for teaching common law and opened the first law school in the United States. The Litchfield Law School launched the town into regional and national prominence. Ultimately, the small law school would boast of having educated two vice-presidents of the United States (Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun), as well as fourteen governors, fourteen members of the federal cabinet, twenty-eight U.S. Senators, 100 members of the House of Representatives, three members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and many state and local public officials.
Tapping Reeve’s success with the law school and the law he taught his students was critical in the arguments used in the Amistad case. Shortly after Judge Judson’s initial hearing on the USS Washington, Dwight P. Janes, an abolitionist from New London, contacted Roger Sherman Baldwin, an attorney known as a defender of justice for the less fortunate. Baldwin, who attended the law school in 1812, was the primary lawyer for the Amistad Africans and argued their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
