Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, Legacy (American National Biography)

Cobb's greatest significance lay in his work in the law. He worked, from 1849 to 1857, as the reporter for the Georgia Supreme Court. He also argued cases in that court as well as in other southern courts. He was a driving force in the creation of a law school at the University of Georgia in 1859. An often overlooked part of his legal work concerned the codification of the law of Georgia. Codification was a highly controversial legal movement resisted vigorously by those steeped in the common law. It reduced basic but flexible common law principles to the more rigid language of statutes.