A Legal History Of Scotland The Eighteenth Century

This book is the first monograph to analyse the workings of Scotland’s legal profession in its early modern European context. It is a comprehensive survey of lawyers working in the local and central courts; investigating how they interacted with their clients and with each other, the legal principles governing ethical practice, and how they fulfilled a social role through providing free services to the poor and also services to town councils and other corporations. Based heavily on a wide range of archival sources, and reflecting the contemporary importance of local societies of lawyers, John Finlay offers a groundbreaking yet accessible study of the eighteenth-century legal profession which adds a new dimension to our knowledge of Enlightenment Scotland.

First published in 1984. Part of The Journal of Legal History which publishes articles and book reviews on the history of the law in the British Isles, and also contributes in English on significant developments in the countries of the Commonwealth and the U.S.A. This edition includes articles on sources of literature, institutional writings, dissasine and mortancester in Scots Law, and the 1707 Union.

This collection brings together a selection of the most cited articles published by Professor John W. Cairns. Essays range from Scots Law from 16th and 17th century Scotland, through to the 18th century influence of Dutch Humanism into the 19th century, a

At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wizardry transformed the fortunes of France, enriching speculators and investors across the continent, and he was made Controller-General of Finances, effectively becoming the French Prime Minister. But the fall from grace that was to follow was every bit as spectacular as his meteoric rise. John Law, by a biographer of Adam Smith and the author of Frozen Desire and Capital of the Mind, dramatises the life of one of the most inventive financiers in history, a man who was born before his time and in whose day the word millionaire came to be coined.

The first textbook on Scottish legal history from the genesis of Scots law to the Union, written from a legal perspective From the roots of a law that applied to all subjects of the Scottish King to the Union with England, this new legal history textbook explores the genesis, evolution and enduring influence of early Scots law. Discover how and why Scots law come into being, how was it used in dispute resolution during the medieval and early modern periods and how its authority developed over the centuries.

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled, and in the solutions they proposed. This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. General Editor: Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary

Scotland has a special claim for the attention of comparative lawyers, of legal historians and of those who seek to identify a common core in European private law or to develop a new jus commune. For Scotland stands at the intersection of the two great traditions of European law - of the law of Rome, received and developed in Continental Europe and of the law which originated in England but was exported throughout the British Empire. In Scotland, uniquely in Europe, there is to be found a fusion of the civil law and the common law. Law in Scotland has a long history, uninterrupted either by revolution or by codification. It is rich in source material, both printed and archival. Yet hitherto the history of legal doctrine has been relatively neglected. This work is a detailed and systematic study in the field of private law. It takes key topics from the law of obligations and the law of property and traces their development from earliest times to the present day. A picture emerges of the slow but profound reception of civil law, beginning in the medieval period and continuing until the eighteenth century and of the influential role of Canon law.

"The rationale of this book is to provide a systematic overview of the functions of a seigneurial jurisdiction in the Scottish Highlands prior to the Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1747. In doing so, a detailed picture of life in the Highlands during this period emerges from the sources. These sources are the five surviving court books left by the regality court of Grant. These begin in the year 1690 and end in 1729"--