Chancellor Kent

About this Marker

James Kent (1763–1847) is widely regarded as the father of American law. His four-volume Commentaries on American Law, first published 1826–1830 and revised into a sixth edition by the time of his death, became the foundational treatise for the early American legal system — the American equivalent of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, and a reference text that judges and lawyers continued to cite well into the twentieth century.

He was born on July 31, 1763 in Doansburg — the hamlet of what was then southern Dutchess County (and is now the Town of Southeast in Putnam County) where his grandfather, the Reverend Elisha Kent, was minister of the Presbyterian congregation that became the Old Southeast Church. His childhood here was disrupted by the Revolution: in 1779, when he was sixteen and away studying, the British burned his childhood home. He graduated from Yale in 1781 and was admitted to the bar four years later.

Kent’s ascent through New York’s legal hierarchy was rapid. He served two terms in the State Assembly; in 1796 Governor John Jay appointed him Master in Chancery, and the following year Recorder of New York City. In 1798 he became a Justice of the New York Supreme Court of Judicature, and in 1804 its Chief Justice. In 1814 he became Chancellor of New York — the head of the state’s court of equity, the office that gave him his enduring title. The mandatory retirement age was sixty, so Kent stepped down in 1823. Retirement did not slow him down: he took a professorship at Columbia College, and his lectures there became the basis of the Commentaries that secured his reputation.

He died in New York City on December 12, 1847 and was buried in the New York Marble Cemetery. About twenty-five years later, the family relocated his remains to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church Cemetery in Beacon, in the shadow of Mount Beacon — in keeping with a sentiment he had recorded in an 1828 letter:

As I was born and nourished in my boyish days among the Highlands east of the Hudson, I have always loved wild and rural scenery; and the sight of mountains, hills, woods and streams, always enchanted me, and does still.

The marker itself has an unusual history. The original was erected in 1947 by the Landmarks Preservation Society on the centennial of Kent’s death. It was later lost; the marker visible today is a 1988 duplicate, made from the original’s text and form. The inscription notes that Kent was born “on a site to the west” — the marker is directional, pointing toward (rather than standing on) the birthplace.