Law in Scotland has a long history, uninterrupted either by revolution or by codification. This work is the first detailed and systematic study in the field of Scottish 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.

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law builds upon the legal historian F.W. Maitland's famous observation that history involves comparison, and that those who ignore every system but their own 'hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history'. The extensive introduction addresses the intellectual challenges posed by comparative approaches to legal history. This is followed by twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the 24th British Legal History Conference. These essays explore patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice across an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range. Carefully selected to provide a network of inter-connections, they contribute to our better understanding of legal history by combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This two-volume series offers the first detailed and systematic account of the history of private law in Scotland. Volume 2 covers topics such as insurance, negligence, liability, breach of contract, unfair contract terms, sale, and defamation.

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.

Présentation de l'édition : This up-to-date treatment of an area of increasing importance provides an in-depth and clear analysis of the complexities of the subject. The newly revised edition of this highly regarded book provides a thorough account of all branches of Scots private law in their conflict of laws dimension. A noted feature of the subject, to which the book pays central attention, is the expanding influence of the EU legislative programme for civil justice, which affects the substance of the conflict rules of all European Member States. The Brussels I Recast regulation is given a full analysis in particular, as are Rome IV (wills and succession) and Rome III (choice of law in divorce). The book explains and analyses the rules of civil and commercial jurisdiction set out in the Brussels I Regulation, and the choice of law rules of the law of obligations contained in the new Rome I and Rome II Regulations. In family law, a full treatment is given of the rules pertaining to jurisdiction and recognition and enforcement of judgments in matrimonial matters and matters of parental responsibility, as contained in the Brussels II bis Regulation, including their interaction with the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. The chapter on marriage is updated significantly to take account of same sex marriage legislation in Scotland and England. Full account is given of the conflict rules pertaining to property, in the various contexts of matrimonial and cohabiting relationships, lifetime transfers, insolvency and succession. The book is a thorough and accessible treatment of the theory and methodology employed in this branch of the law, and constitutes an immensely valuable source of information, for students of the subject and practitioners, about the changing content of this important area of the law."

Originally published: 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956.

Comprehensive and accessible, this book offers a concise synthesis of the evolution of the law in Western Europe, from ancient Rome to the beginning of the twentieth century. It situates law in the wider framework of Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural developments.

The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernisation – transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernisation, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I:Private Law and Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem. Contributors are Michał Gałędek, Katrin Kiirend-Pruuli, Anna Klimaszewska, Łukasz Jan Korporowicz, Beata J. Kowalczyk, Marju Luts-Sootak, Marcin Michalak, Annamaria Monti, Zsuzsanna Peres, Sara Pilloni, Hesi Siimets-Gross, Sean Thomas, Bart Wauters, Steven Wilf, and Mingzhe Zhu.

A comparative investigation into the revolution in private law in the era of human rights Scotland and South Africa are mixed jurisdictions, combining features of common law and civil law traditions. Over the last decade a shared feature in both Scotland and South Africa has been a new and intense focus on human rights. In Scotland the European Convention on Human Rights now constitutes an important element in the foundation of all domestic law. Similarly, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, adopted in 1996, has as its cornerstone a Bill of Rights that binds not only the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and all organs of state, but also private parties. Of course the "constitutional moments" from which these documents sprang were very different and the Scottish and South African experience in some aspects could not be more dissimilar. Yet in many respects the parallels are close and compelling. This book, written by experts from both jurisdictions, examines exactly how human-rights provisions influence private law, looking at all branches of the subject. Moreover, it gives a unique perspective by comparing the approach in these kindred legal systems, thus providing a benchmark for both.