An elite group of New York lawyers systematically continued their legal education by organizing the Moot, a law society that met between 1770 and 1775 to debate points of law. Of the approximately seventy lawyers practicing in New York City at this time, twenty belonged to the Moot, and its members included William Livingston, John Tabor Kempe, and William Smith. The Moot was modeled on The Moot of Gray’s Inn; similar groups existed in other colonies, such as the Boston Sodality (est. 1764) and the Newark, New Jersey, Institutio Legalis (est. 1770).1 John Jay, a charter member of the Moot, rarely missed a meeting and for a brief period served as secretary. He and his fellow members debated such legal questions as the manner in which an executor should plead to avoid payment of testators’ book debts, various issues of intercolony comity and conflicts of laws, the precise words in a devise that constituted a fee tail, the authority of inferior courts of the province to grant new trials, and whether the English Statute of Frauds extended to the colony of New York. Among more serious duties, members of the Moot agreed “to take notes of all questions of Law that may be agitated in the Supreme Court during the succeeding Term” and to “make Reports thereof, and produce them to the moot with all convenient speed.”2