John Finlay, Legal Practice in Eighteenth Century Scotland
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0402 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Author | |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Pages | 136-137 |
By virtue of their longevity, the central courts of Scotland and the legal professions which serve them have a folk history, or, more accurately, histories, of their origins and development. Like many such folk memories, there is a kernel of truth wrapped in a larger husk of imperfect recall and the obscurity of passing generations. Across the past three decades, John Cairns' work has done much to expand our understanding of the education, practice and inner world of the eighteenth century Faculty of Advocates, and in his turn, John Finlay's more recent work has widened our knowledge considerably into the landward counties of Scotland and into a longer historical perspective of the practice of law.
Building on his previous work on the early-modern profession, and on the legal professionals around the eighteenth century College of Justice, Finlay's latest book is a work of rich archival research surveying the diversity of legal practice across Scotland in that century. At the outset, Finlay suggests that there were three distinctions of significance: “between central court practitioners and those who worked provincially; that between those who argued in court and those who did not; and that between those who were qualified as notaries… and those who were not” (1). This study elaborates the significance of the first two fairly convincingly, the third rather less so.
Finlay explores legal practice thematically, including consideration of income, management of practice, ethics and etiquette, professional societies and professional solidarity, and pro bono work for the indigent. Several specialist legal functions are also addressed: the importance of burghs as engines of legal work, the role of notaries and of procurators fiscal. While each chapter begins with a section orienting the reader, there is a diversity of structure between chapters so that comparisons between town and country, for example, are not always easy to draw.
At the heart of the work is a depth of archival sources, both burgh and legal records, as well as private correspondence which provides an array of examples. There is also illuminating use of the Session Papers in the Advocates Library, illustrating inter alia the pleading language of the eighteenth century advocate, the financial cost of litigation, and the fact that, across the social spectrum, Scots of the period “were a litigious people” (5).
A good illustration of the complexity of the lawyer-client relationship emerges in Finlay's...
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