Theodore William Dwight
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Theodore William Dwight (1822-1892), American jurist and educator, cousin of Theodore Dwight Woolsey and of Timothy Dwight V, was born July 18, 1822 in Catskill, New York.
His father was Benjamin Woolsey Dwight (1780-1850), a physician and merchant, and his grandfather was Timothy Dwight IV (1752-1817), a prominent theologian, educator, author, and president of Yale University from 1795-1817. Theodore Dwight graduated from Hamilton College in 1840 where he studied physics under SFB Morse and John William Draper.
Dwight taught the classics at Utica Academy in 1840-1841. He studied law at Yale and was admitted to the bar in 1845. Between 1842-1858, he taught at Hamilton, first as tutor and later as professor of law, history, civil polity, and political economy. In 1853 he became dean of the Hamilton Law School.
In 1858, he accepted an invitation to develop a department of law at Columbia. He was the sole professor of law at Columbia until the department was expanded in 1873, eventually became Columbia Law School. He served as the dean at Columbia Law School until 1891 when he and other faculty, students, and alumni of Columbia Law School, protesting the Columbia trustees’ attempts to dictate the teaching methods used by professors, left to found New York Law School. Dwight was a leading proponent of the Socratic method of instruction in which classroom discussion of cases driven by illustrative questioning took precedent over the usual lecture and note-taking.
As a legal educator and dean, Dwight did much to establish the superiority of academic training over office instruction (the norm at the time) to a skeptical legal profession.
Dwight was also a prominent figure in political and social reforms. In 1873, Governor Dix of New York appointed Dwight a member of the commission of appeals, which in 1874-1875 aided the court of appeals to clear its docket. In 1886 he served as counsel for five Andover professors charged with heresy. Dwight was particularly interested in prison reform; he collaborated on A Report on Prisons and Reformatories in the United States and Canada (1867), served as president of the New York Prison Association, and was a delegate to the International Prison Congress at Stockholm (1878). He helped draw up the bill for the establishment of the Elmira Reformatory and wrote an early report that helped lead to the organization the State Charities Aid Association.
Dwight edited Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1864); was associate editor of the American Law Register and legal editor of Johnson's Cyclopaedia; and published Charitable Uses: Argument in the Rose Will Case (1863). He was a non-resident professor of law at Cornell (1869-1871) and at Amherst (1870-1872).
Dwight died in Clinton, New York, on the 28th of June 1892.
