Educator, Lawyer. He is recognized as an American educator and lawyer in the 18th century who is credited as the founder of the first formal law school in America. Prior to his law school, law students studied privately under other lawyers. Born the son of Abner Reeve and his wife, Deborah Tapping, his father, a Yale graduate, was a Presbyterian minister. In 1763 Reeve graduated from the College of New Jersey, which eventually became Princeton University. After graduation, he began his educational career and was hired by Timothy Edwards, eldest son of the college's third president and theologian Jonathan Edwards, to tutor the many children in his household. This was followed by him teaching in a newly formed school in Elizabethtown and tutoring at College of New Jersey for one year. His skills in teaching were soon recognized. In 1772, he started a law practice in Litchfield, Connecticut, and the following year he commenced teaching law to his first student Aaron Burr, who also was his brother-in-law. During the American Revolution, Reeve served briefly as a militia officer and was appointed by the Connecticut Assembly as a recruiting officer. Demand for his expertise in teaching law increased to the point that Reeve needed to construct a one-room school house next to his home in 1784. This school became known as Litchfield Law School. When he was appointed as a Superior Court judge, he hired his former student James Gould in 1798 as his associate, and the two would command together one of the most prestigious schools in the country until Reeve retired in 1820. Gould remained there until 1830. Some 1,100 students attended the school from every region of the new United States of America before the school closed in 1833. Among the other notable students of the school were Vice Presidents John C. Calhoun and Aaron Burr, Jr., 101 United States Congressmen, 28 United States Senators, 6 Presidential Cabinet Members, 3 Justices of the United States Supreme Court, and 14 State Governors. Besides being an educator of the law, he is recognized for his participation as the co-counsel with Theodore Sedgwick in the 1781 case Brom and Bett vs. Ashley. The case involved a male and a female slave, who escaped the bondage of Colonel Ashley and were seeking to be set free. Colonel Ashely was demanding their return to his property, but the ruling made the slaves legally free. The ruling was upheld in an appeal in the State Supreme Court and would lead to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. The female slave took the name of Elizabeth "Mumbet" Freeman, and began to work as a faithful servant for Sedgwick for the rest of her life and was buried in his family's plot. In 1814, Tapping Reeve was elevated to Chief Judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. In 1771 he married Sarah Burr, the orphaned daughter of Aaron Burr, Sr. The Reeves had one child, a son named Aaron Burr Reeve, who was born in 1780. After being a widower for two years, he married in 1799 his housekeeper Elizabeth Thompson.