Tapping Reeve (Wikimedia Commons).

Tapping Reeve of Litchfield is revered in the history of the Connecticut legal system. The founder of the first law school in the United States, Reeve remains to this day a venerated figure in Connecticut legal circles. His law school still stands, a physical testament to the enormous influence it had in the early years of not only Connecticut but the Republic itself. Numerous significant political and legal figures were among its graduates.

Today, it seems unimaginable how Reeve would find himself a federal criminal defendant. As in our own era of political battles waged in the federal judicial arena, wanton partisanship by Thomas Jefferson and his followers supplies the answer.

The election of Jefferson in 1800 was not met with approval in Connecticut which, like Reeve, was solidly Federalist. Reeve was unable to contain his utter distaste for Jefferson and the Republican Party. In 1801, Reeve began a literary campaign against Jefferson in a local Litchfield paper, The Monitor, employing various pseudonyms. The criticisms of Jefferson and his adherents leveled by Reeve included allegations of boiling lust and being sons of Sodom.

In a manner reminiscent of the Federalist prosecution of Republicans under the infamous Sedition Act, the Jeffersonians plotted their revenge. Due to a lack of influence in the Federalist controlled state system, the Jeffersonians turned to the federal courts. In 1806, after skillfully obtaining control of it by patronage, the Jeffersonians launched a politically receptive grand jury to investigate whether Reeve and others had libeled the president in their publications.

The grand jury returned an indictment against Reeve for common law seditious libel based upon his article in the December 2, 1801 edition of The Monitor, under the pseudonym Phocion. There, Reeve accused Jefferson of multiple acts of misconduct including subverting the constitutional rights of citizens, creating anarchy akin to that of the French Revolution, destroying the judiciary and seeking to create himself as a despot. The publisher of The Monitor, Thomas Collier, in addition to others, was also indicted.

Reeve's response to this charge was one of magnificent defiance. He refused to truckle to the efforts of the Jeffersonians to silence him. He continued to write critically about the Jefferson administration in the face of the criminal charge.

Fortunately, the cases against Reeve and others were not aggressively pushed by federal prosecutors. In 1808, a number of the indictments, including Reeve's, were dismissed. One of the remaining cases, United States v. Hudson and Goodwin, which involved the now Hartford Courant, ultimately went to the United States Supreme Court which determined, in 1812, that federal courts' criminal jurisdiction was limited to violations of federal law or provisions of the Constitution. Thus, the federal courts lacked common law criminal jurisdiction, precluding a prosecution on these grounds.

In an era of destructive partisanship, it is important to observe that our politically convulsed era does not own a historical monopoly on the misguided use of the federal judiciary.