Dwight, Theodore William

Dwight, Theodore William,

1822–92, American lawyer, b. Catskill, N.Y., grad. Hamilton College, 1840. He studied at Yale law school and was admitted to the bar in 1845. He was professor of law and later head of the law school at Hamilton. In 1858 he became the sole member of the faculty of the newly established Columbia school of law. Until 1873, when the faculty was enlarged, he taught all private-law subjects and lectured elsewhere extensively. From 1873 until his retirement in 1891 he headed the law faculty. 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 (1878) a delegate to the International Prison Congress at Stockholm.