John W Cairns, Law, Lawyers and Humanism. Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume I John W Cairns, Enlightenment, Legal Education and Critique. Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume II
| Pages | 466-468 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0450 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
In the two volumes of his
First, Professor Cairns has chosen the articles selected for the book carefully in order to draw out core themes developed in his research. The first volume focuses on “the development of Scots law and the Scottish legal system from a transitional phase at the beginning of the Early Modern period through to the start of the Modern era in the nineteenth century, in particular exploring the significance of the Civil Law, and its importance in legal education” (I, xxv). By contrast, “the second volume of essays builds on the background found in the first to examine in detail the impact of the Enlightenment on Scots law and the Scottish legal system.” The argument pursued there is that “an Enlightened critique” of how law ought to be developed and reformed was “developed… through legal education” (I, xxv, read together with II, 37–81; 341–363; see also I, 144–220). The argument continues that this ultimately resulted in legal reform, and it helps to explain the radical restructuring of the Court of Session in the early nineteenth century. It will be appreciated that one of the key themes of both volumes is the subject of legal education in Scotland; the history of the subject is one in which Cairns displays a particular mastery. He demonstrates how engaging the topic can be. The present reviewer enjoyed in particular his reconstructions of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century arguments concerning the relevance of Civil Law studies to aspiring lawyers (II, 37–63).
Second, while the articles have not been reworked to take into account fresh scholarship that has emerged since their publication, Cairns has written introductions to each volume that contextualise his work in light of the fact that the discipline of Scottish legal history has developed rapidly over the last decade. He notes that the first section of...
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