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Non-legal library of Chancellor James Kent,the first professor of law at Columbia College, appointed in 1793 before Columbia University instituted its law school. He also was a practitioner, having served 25 years as a state judge in New York, before he became a law professor. Chancellor Kent invented legal scholarship, presenting a series of lectures at Columbia in the 1820s, and then publishing them as the Commentaries on American Law, characterized by one recent writer as "the most influential American law book of the ante-bellum period."