Male

December 5, 1770

May 11, 1838

Branford, CT

Sally Tracy Gould (October 21, 1798)

James Gould was the son of Dr. William and Mary (Guy) Gould. His early education at the common schools was hampered by his poor eyesight. Nevertheless, Gould entered Yale in 1787 and eventually graduated with High Honors in 1795. While at Yale, he worked as a tutor and studied law with Judge Chauncey in New Haven. After college, he worked briefly as schoolteacher in New Haven, CT and then in Wethersfield, CT and Baltimore, MD before coming to study at Litchfield Law School in 1795.

Gould studied with Tapping Reeve for several years. His wife, Sally McCurdy Tracy was the eldest child of Uriah Tracy, a Litchfield Law School graduate and U.S. Senator. Three of their sons would the Litchfield Law School, and eight of his nine children would survive him.

Gould settled in Litchfield ...with his wife and when Tapping Reeve was appointed to the Supreme Court of Connecticut in 1798, he asked Gould to work as a fellow instructor at the law school. Gould and Reeve worked together for many years and Gould constructed a second law school building on his property in North Street to accommodate the growing numbers of students who came to Litchfield to study the law.

When Reeve was forced to retire in 1820 due to his increasing forgetfulness and poor health, the Litchfield law School was left solely in the hands of Gould. Before the retirement of Reeve, Gould had maintained his law practice outside of his teaching, but in 1820, he began to concentrate all his efforts on lecturing at the Law School. Like Reeve, Gould was appointed to the Connecticut Superior Court, however, he was turned out by a political 'revolution' in Connecticut in 1818 that put the Federalist party out of power.

Gould maintained the Litchfield Law School until 1833 when his own failing health as well as his grief over the death of his son forced him to close the school. He was a preeminent teacher of the law in that period and was widely recognized by his legal colleagues as a critical scholar and excellent teacher. In 1832, he published A Treatise on the Principles of Pleading a Civil Action.
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From 1803-1813, James Gould was a member of the Committee of Examination for the Litchfield County Court admissions to the bar.

1795

Graduated from Yale College in 1795.

Lawyer; Educator; Political Office; Business

1798

Federalist

Justice of the Superior Court (CT) 1816-1818

[We are currently working to update and confirm citations of attendance.]

Dexter, Franklin Bowditch. Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of College History, Vol. 4. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1907.

Baldwin, Lewis, William Draper. Great American Lawyers, Vol. 2. The John C. Winston Company, 1907.

Boardman, David Sherman. Sketches of the early Lights of the Litchfield Bar. J. Humphrey, Jr., 1860.

Lewis, William Draper. The Great American Lawyer vol. II. 1907.

Reed, Alfred. Training for the Public Profession of the Law. Arno Press. 1921.

Warren, Charles. History of the Harvard Law School and Early Legal Conditions in America. Lewis Publishing Company: New York, 1908.

Dargo, George. Law in the New Republic. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1983.