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The article presents abstracts of papers given at the 25th Annual Conference of the Scottish Legal History Group. They include "Thoughts on Wrang and Unlaw," "The Application of Canon Law in Medieval Scotland, in Light of the Evidence of the Registers of the Sacra Apostolica Penitenzieria," and "Civil Procedure, Appeal and Advocation in the Court of Session in Sixteenth-Century Scotland."

The 1935 judgment in Woolmington v Director of Public Prosecutions established the 'golden thread' principle that, in general, the prosecution bears the burden of proof in criminal trials. This is the 'cardinal principle of the criminal law', not just in England and Wales, but right across the common law world. It is a principle that is now largely taken for granted, but when Woolmington was decided, it represented a sharp and largely unexpected break with past authority. Drawing on a 'legal archaeology' methodology, this paper steps outside the limited and, in some respects, misleading facts contained in the official law reports and considers Woolmington in its broader socio-economic and political context, and with particular reference to important gender issues that arise. It seeks, thereby, to improve our understanding of this revolutionary judgment and how it came to be made at this juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on several conferences including those in memory of Justice Alan Rodger to be held from September 7-8, 2012, the 31st Annual Conference of the Australia New Zealand Law and History Society to be held form December 10-12, 2012 and 21st British Legal History Conference to be held from July10-13, 2013.

When widows claimed dower they were normally claiming part of the lands which their husband had possessed during their marriage. But the medieval common law also allowed widows to claim lands which the husband had never held if they had been in the possession of a close relative of the husband at the time of the marriage provided the relative had been present at the marriage and given consent to the endowment made by his or her heir apparent. This paper analyses the sixty or so actions of dower ex assensu found on the plea rolls for the period down to 1307 and in associated law reports. That assent was recorded in a written charter in relatively few cases. In most the court relied in part or in whole on the evidence of witnesses present at the ceremony. Sometimes their evidence alone was decisive. More commonly witnesses were added to a jury which gave a collective verdict on whether consent had been given. These cases provide a valuable reminder that witness evidence was already in the thirteenth century a regular and accepted feature of at least one form of common law action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Lent Term 1668/9, John Vincent, a bencher of Gray’s Inn, gave a reading on the Merchants’ Assurances Act 1601 (43 Eliz. I, c.12). The notes of the law reporter, Joseph Keble, record this observance of the centuries-old tradition of readings, which was destined to expire within the next two decades. This paper situates Vincent’s reading within the changing tradition of readings in the seventeenth century. It highlights the role readings continued to play in disseminating sophisticated legal learning, particularly in relation to newer areas of practice such as marine insurance, which were largely uninformed by statute, common law precedent or reference works, and would have been difficult to master through book-study alone. It examines a selection of issues discussed during the reading, focussing on legal outcomes grounded in the ‘customs’, usages, practices and understandings of merchants, and illustrating how these were perceived as exceptional by comparison to the ordinary rules of the common law. The nature and jurisdiction of London’s court of assurances, reconstituted and empowered by the 1601 Act, are also discussed. More generally, this paper demonstrates the value of post-Restoration readings for historians of English law in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century untilMorisonvMoat(1851), described by theOxford History of the Laws of Englandas ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions could no longer be enforced in the guild courts by the late seventeenth century, or within the wider jurisdiction of the courts of the City of London. Instead, as the second half of the paper shows, it was the law courts proper that came to provide succour to those working trade secrets, allowing them to both restrain employees from using secrets for their own benefit and/or to sell secrets to other parties. This was a halting process, but one that had certainly begun prior to Morison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Roman empire was legally pluralistic. But what exactly does this entail in concrete terms? With the growth in historical studies of legal pluralism in the Roman empire, some significant differences in approach have emerged. This article tests and clarifies some of the limits in the current 'legal pluralism' conceptual landscape, focussing on disputes and dispute resolution. It is argued that a clearer distinction should be drawn between 'normative' and 'jurisdictional' pluralism, though both approaches still raise certain conceptual problems. The place of disputes within the family within this wider institutional picture is then taken as a case study in the final part of the paper, and it is suggested that while family disputes can evidence 'legal pluralism' in the 'norms' sense, there is less to suggest that there were a multitude of officially sanctioned legal fora available for resolving family disputes. As a result, many went beyond the law. This has wider implications for the study of legal pluralism in antiquity and the problem of integrating alternative dispute resolution (ADR) into the pluralistic picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the acquisition of manuscripts related to Scottish law, including some of the papers of Charles Wren, Thomas Adams, and Robert Thorp.

The article reports on the 2017 conference of the Scottish Legal History Group on October 7, 2017 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It presents summaries of the papers offered at the meeting, including ones on punishment of rebellion in Scotland, manuscript transmission of "Regiam Majestatem," and King Charles !'s reform of church finance in Scotland.

A widely accepted view is that, for Bentham, legal interpretation was a mechanical or technical matter. This paper reconstructs Bentham’s complex theory of legal interpretation and challenges the above view. It demonstrates that Bentham’s theory of legal interpretation consists of three major theses. First, when there are different interpretations of a law, the authoritative interpreter ought to be the sovereign legislature. Second, strict interpretation attributes to the legislature the will it actually has when making the law. The strict interpretation of a law ought to take the text of the law itself as the standard, and then be guided by its purpose. Third, liberal interpretation attributes to the legislature a will that it would have had if it had been aware of the case before the court, but which it in fact failed to have through inadvertency. Liberal interpretation is a necessary evil, and must be checked: liberal interpretation ought to be made according to the pattern and materials of the old laws, and be subject to the authority of the sovereign legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars of emotion and the law have sought to demonstrate the significant role emotion plays in shaping the operation of courtrooms, the development of legal theory and practice, and the possibilities for justice. This paper contributes to the discussion by exploring what happens when emotion is ignored or underplayed in trial narratives, seeking to demonstrate that whose emotion is considered to be important can shed light on power dynamics, law and the cultures in which law operates. It does so through a case study of women on trial for murdering their husbands in early nineteenth-century Ireland. It argues that emotion is not simply another species of evidence that can be used in criminal processes, but itself a type of narrative – emotion is constructed and performed by actors in legal dramas and forms a competing story to others in the courtroom space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstracts of papers delivered at the October 1, 2016 36th annual conference of the Scottish Legal History Group in Edinburgh, Scotland are presented on topics including murder cases of the Justiciary Court from 1625 to 1650, the history of Scotland's High Court of Admiralty from 1681 to 1830, and the nineteenth-century history of animal welfare in Scotland.

While Craig's relationship to, and emergence from, the French legal humanist tradition has always been widely recognized, this paper constitutes a deeper analysis of the specific threads connecting Craig to the humanist literature of the sixteenth century. It examines the first chapter to the Jus feudale and, by studying Craig's aetiology of law and society, assesses the literary and cultural influences on his historiographical product. It demonstrates that Craig's understanding of the earliest human society and of law's evolution was highly dependent on continental humanist literature and, above all, on the writings of Jean Bodin. Yet it also shows that Craig was capable of independent thought and rigorous critical analysis of sources. The article examines Craig's relationship to the writings of his fellow Scot and humanist, George Buchanan, whose De jure regni apud Scotos constitutes a vital intertextual frame for many aspects of Craig's thought, particularly as it relates to sovereignty, monarchy and the limits of royal power. Moreover, it will be seen that the first chapter, though seemingly an antiquarian digression, actually reflects Craig's thoughts on many significant political issues that were current in Scotland at the time he was writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 38th annual conference and Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Scottish Legal History Group which was held on October 6, 2018 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it mentions the next conference on October 5, 2019. Abstracts are provided for papers such as "Supplications to the Papacy in Late Medieval Scotland" by Dr. Alan MacQuarrie and "Continuity and Change: the Highland Estate and the Regality Court of Grant" by Charles Fletcher which were presented at the 2018 event.

This paper is a response to John Barton's posthumous paper on the date and authorship of the English thirteenth-century legal treatise Bracton. That paper was an extended critique of sections of a much shorter paper I had published in 1996 on these and related topics. It responds to the main criticisms Barton makes of my paper. It accepts a few of these but not others, and does not accept his main arguments against assigning a date prior to 1240 for significant parts of the treatise nor his renewed assertion of the claims of Henry de Bracton to be the sole author of the treatise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development of bills of exchange and promissory notes in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will be argued that the early law of negotiability was founded on a principled interpretation of the common law and that parliament's eventual rejection of this law resulted in a half-century of confusion. This time period, however, was fundamental in the development of the modern principle of negotiability as the courts struggled to create a workable framework for the transfer of written instruments. This paper examines the early conceptual difficulty of transferring written instruments and studies why bills of exchange were capable of transfer, despite the common law's bar on the assignment of choses in action, whereas promissory notes were not considered transferable at common law prior to the eighteenth century. The most important figure for the development of this area was Chief Justice Holt, whose legal interpretation of the transferability of bills of exchange was based on clearly defined and long-standing principles of common law. This interpretation of the common law was viewed as a hindrance to trade, and in response to Holt CJ's decisions, parliament passed the Statute of Anne 1704, allowing promissory notes to be transferable in the same manner as bills of exchange. This began to collapse the distinction between bills of exchange and promissory notes, which created numerous conceptual difficulties in the law of negotiable instruments. It was not until the case of Grant v Vaughan, heard in 1764, that the courts fully developed a new framework for the negotiability of written instruments. This early law displays the difficulty that courts had in developing the underlying principles of the assignment of written instruments, and deciphering its development is fundamental in understanding the modern principle of negotiability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anita Rupprecht's paper in this number, the first detailed discussion of the role of the Zong massacre in abolitionist writings to be published, raises a number of interesting questions. Perhaps the boldest suggestion is that the Zong served, in its above-decks visibility, as a stand-in for the below-decks invisibility of an experience of which there are almost no eyewitness accounts left by those who experienced it: the Middle Passage itself. In Rupprecht's account it circulates in the writings of Thomas Clarkson and others, both as an emblem of the horrors of slavery and, in descriptions of the court case, of the cold-blooded equation of persons and property. The conclusion of the paper is also arresting in its shift in focus from the traumatic memory of slavery to the legal and political actions involved in recent campaigns for 'reparations' and the discovery of documents related to the legacy of slavery. I want, in this response - which is offered from the perspective of cultural history, though it touches on the legal issues at points - to explore these two aspects of her discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Millon argued in a 1989 article that medieval and early modern legal historians had been beguiled into supposing that civil litigation in these periods was decided in accordance with the ‘official’ legal doctrine found in law reports, plea roll arguments and Inns of Court readings when in reality their outcome was generally determined by juries exercising their own normative discretion in reaching their verdicts. This paper challenges this pessimistic conclusion, at least for the period around 1300. It demonstrates from evidence drawn from plea rolls and mainly manuscript law reports the degree of judicial control over juries exercised within the courtroom and the way in which jury verdicts were considered, and not just accepted, by courts. It also argues that the application of substantive legal rules by judges for the decision of litigation was a more important phenomenon than Millon supposed and that legal rules were also regularly invoked and applied in the preliminary pleading in cases and thereby shaped and determined the issues which went for jury decision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Court of Appeal judgment of Rochefoucauld v Boustead [1897] 1 Ch. 196 through use of archive records, rarely cited law reports and nineteenth-century academic opinion. A full and hitherto untold account of the facts of the case is presented. It is revealed that the land which was the subject matter of the dispute was sold under the direction of the Ceylon District Court, and that the plaintiff was an accomplished individual who utilized various means to frustrate her former husband's attempts to obtain the land. The Court of Appeal's rulings that the defendant was a trustee of the land for the prevention of fraud, and that the trust was to be treated as an express trust, are also analysed with the aim of establishing how these issues were understood at the time of the judgment. It is argued that both of these aspects of the judgment were regarded as uncontroversial because there was a settled concept of equitable fraud, and because trusts imposed for the prevention of such fraud were an established category of trust in their own right, separate from express, resulting or constructive trusts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duke of Somerset v Cookson (1735) occupies an important place in English legal history as a leading authority for Chancery jurisdiction to order specific delivery of movable property where an award of damages would be inadequate. The property at issue was the Corbridge lanx, now in the British Museum, but then claimed as treasure trove by the duke of Somerset as lord of the manor of Corbridge. This paper re-examines Cookson as the first reported English decision relating to treasure trove, and uses later treasure trove claims by the duke of Somerset's successors to the manor of Corbridge, the dukes of Northumberland, to shed fresh light on the 1735 decision and on the development of treasure trove practice from the eighteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a newborn child that has been abandoned by a parent remain under the potestas of the father? According to modern Romanists, it did. Of the two texts that are usually referred to in this connection, only one mentions the notion patria potestas. This text, D. 40.4.29, is about a foundling who had found his birth mother and then claimed not only his father's inheritance but also the freedmen who had been manumitted under his father's will. The first claim was successful, the second one was not. In Romanist literature, the success of the first claim is explained by the foundling still being under his father's potestas and thus being a suus heres. However, the patria potestas is only mentioned in connection with the second claim. This paper argues that, while D. 40.4.29 does not prove the continued potestas of a father over his foundling son, it does point to the increasing importance of blood relationship in the law of succession of the second century AD. The reference to the patria potestas forms part of the argument that the foundling should not ask for more than what he would have received as a testamentary heir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulation of market activities, by both local and central authorities, has been studied in some detail, but the interrelationship between the two has received considerably less attention. This paper examines market regulations and their enforcement in London prior to the Black Death, including measures to control prices, wages, forestalling, product quality, etc. It argues that, although London officials were often obliged to enforce royal orders relative to market activities, the economic policies elaborated by the mayor and aldermen had a significant impact on those adopted by the Crown and applied throughout the realm, particularly on the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain claimed full territorial sovereignty over New Zealand, even though substantive enforcement of its authority against Maori often faced significant challenges. Alarmed at the weakness of British governance in relation to Maori, Governor Thomas Gore Browne proposed a Native Offenders Bill. The Bill proposed giving the New Zealand Governor sweeping powers to ban ‘any communication’ or trade with any Maori within a specified district, or with a particular tribe. Such a ban would, it was claimed, ensure compliance with colonial law. However, the bill was twice rejected by the settler legislature (1856 and 1860), on both constitutional and practical grounds. The paper places the bill in its political and legal contexts, and examines some of the ways colonial administrators and politicians responded to the difference between the government's claim to extensive legal authority and its more limited substantive power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on papers that were delivered at the annual conference of the Scottish Legal History Group on October 2, 2010 in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh, Scotland by historians such as Gero Dolezalek, Andrew Simpson, and Rab Houston. Topics discussed include the office of coroner in Scotland, medieval law in Scotland, and common law.

The article presents a list of accessions to repositories related to legal history in Great Britain including client deeds, court registers, and family and estate papers.

Abstracts of academic papers on legal history by the Scottish Legal History Group conference in 2009 are presented including "The Quality of Scottish Mercy: Royal Letters of Remission in Medieval Scotland, 1100-1603," by Cynthia J. Neville, "The New Consistorial Order: Context and Constitutional Theories from 1559," by Thomas Green, and "The Lords of Session 1700-1801," by John Finlay.

The article discusses the thirty-fifth annual conference and annual general meeting (AGM) of the Scottish Legal History Group (SLHG) which was held in Edinburgh, Scotland on October 3, 2015, and it provides abstracts of several papers by authors such as Dauvit Broun, Joanna Tucker, and Dr. Jenny Wormald which were presented at the event. According to the article, an additional SLHG conference will be held on October 1, 2016. Scottish judicial records and declaratory power are assessed.

This paper examines the judicial construction of jurisdiction over Maori in the 1840s in New Zealand. Using new data, including case material and extra-judicial commentary, it examines the first decisions by the New Zealand Supreme Court on crime between Maori (crime 'inter se'). In so doing, it briefly places New Zealand in a broader context of settler colonies, and considers how colonial judges (such as Chapman J of the Supreme Court of New Zealand) fashioned the common law to fit the contingency of local circumstance, thereby playing their part in constituting local sovereignty. Finally, the article also considers the reaction of settlers to Maori crime and these decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 18 December 1742, Thomas Hill, defendant in the Chancery proceedings in the leading trade mark case, Blanchard v Hill, won a celebrated victory against a representative of the Worshipful Company of the Makers of Playing Cards in the City of London. On 7 December 1743, he was convicted of a revenue offence against the Crown and sentenced to death. No mercy was shown, and on 17 February 1744 he was removed from Newgate prison to Tyburn, where he was hanged. This short note, a postscript to a paper published in 2003, explores the connection between Hill's success in Chancery and his trial and execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers at the 28th annual conference sponsored by the Legal Scottish History Group on October 4, 2008 at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland on matters regarding the law reports is presented. Topics include the long-term project for publication of Sinclair's "Practicks," the earliest Scottish form of law reports, the parliamentary process in the reign of James VI and a re-analysis of the "duel under the law of Clann Duib."

The article presents a list of accessions to archival repositories in Great Britain in 2007 which relate to legal history including client papers, court registers, and deeds and leases.

R. v Bottrill, ex parte Kuchenmeister (1946) established that a ministerial certificate is determinative of whether a state of war exists between the United Kingdom and another state. But of the 'Aryan' German, Kuchenmeister, long a resident in Britain and with a British family, virtually nothing is known. The present paper seeks to uncover the complex story of Kuchenmeister's business activities in the British armaments industry before the war, MI5's determination to have him interned on the not wholly convincing footing of his loyalty to Germany during the war, and Kuchenmeister's prolonged legal battles with the Home Office. A distinction between the law in books and the law in action may be sharply drawn from the affair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the representation of the case of the Zong within the British campaign to abolish the slave trade. It traces the ways in which the case produced an iconic narrative for the movement by paying particular attention to Granville Sharp's original accounting of the event, and then to the ways in which the latter was transformed in key abolition propaganda documents. It is argued that the legal implications of the trial fell away as the Zong was appropriated, and mythologised, in its adaptation to the abolitionists' agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the responses of the English legal system to the radically changing relationship between the arts and conventional morality during the period 1780 to 1959. The art for art's sake movement is identified as being a significant catalyst in the process whereby the arts became removed from traditional moral constraints and the response of the courts in their application of the common law of obscene libel is considered in light of this influence. The replacement of the common law of obscenity by the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 concludes the discussion, the inclusion of a public good defence marking a crucial turning point in this area of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National museums, housing 'national antiquities', were a nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon throughout Europe. In the United Kingdom, they afforded the Treasury a means of preserving relics of antiquity claimed as treasure trove. While satisfying the desire of the scientific community for the preservation of archaeological finds, and national sentiment in Scotland and Ireland, Treasury practice undermined the British Museum's eponymous mission. This paper traces the development and legal consequences of the Treasury policy of national allocation of treasure trove, including the discussion in the Museums Committee of 1898-99 of the 'nationality' of objects and artefacts, and considers the potential wider significance of 'national antiquity' in the context of changing constitutional arrangements in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sir John Fastolf was a wealthy fifteenth-century knight and a successful military commander in the wars with France. During the last decade of his life, he was involved in a number of legal disputes with his East Anglian adversaries, the supporters of the duke of Suffolk. This paper studies one of those disputes, which involved conspiracy and attaint actions between John Andrew, a Suffolk adherent, and Thomas Howes and John Porter, two Fastolf servants. This dispute is interesting for two reasons. Most importantly, it shows that one cannot fully understand the operation of the fifteenth-century legal system without an awareness of the social and political context of litigation. Some contemporary litigation had a clear political nature and political considerations influenced the resolution of legal issues. All aspects of this litigation illustrate the interrelation between the operation of the legal and political systems. Often, legal actions and institutions were vehicles and arenas for political disputes. This litigation also offers an opportunity to explore some fifteenth-century legal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A few weeks before the Licensing Act finally lapsed in May 1695, the Court of Chivalry heard three cases relating to the publication of ‘unauthorised’ prints of the ‘funeral pomp’ of Mary II. In one of these, a leading London publisher of prints, John Overton, was ordered to deliver up the plates from which his print of the queen's lying in state had been made, along with all copies of the print, despite the fact that the Licensing Act did not apply to prints sold separately and the Court of Chivalry had in any case no jurisdiction to enforce press control. Brief records of the cases survive in the College of Arms. This paper sets out to explain and interpret these fragments against the background of the last days of pre-publication censorship in England. Press licensing is first examined with reference to the press coverage following the death of the queen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the contents of the book "The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial," by John H. Langbein. Langbein's use of the terms "accused-speaks trial", "lawyerization" and testing-the-prosecution trial"; Recognition of the importance of Session papers; Reliance of historians on the reports of treason and other high-profile trials contained in the State Trials.

There is hardly any legal institution which better characterizes the thinking and everyday practice of the common law family than the legal institution of the trust. The English common law developed it during the Middle Ages, and it remains popular to this day. The institution of the trust is a unique phenomenon of the common law. Surprisingly, the Zoroastrian community of the Sassanian period in Persia developed some legal techniques which are very close to the common law trust. In this paper I will show the peculiarities and history of what I call the Zoroastrian trust, and hope to establish the basic similarity between the two. What makes this comparison easier is the fact that the two legal institutions developed independently from each other, since there is no possibility of historical interactions between Sassanian Persia (third-seventh centuries AD) and England during the Middle Ages. It is also impossible to speak about common or similar religious, cultural and legal backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the chapter headings of the manuscript of L'Esprit des lois in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris enables us to follow the different phases of a twenty-year redaction process. The main tendencies in Montesquieu worth noting are his concern with the conciseness and simplification and the recurrent concern to give the headings a greater degree of generality, the better to bring out the principles that constitute the real heart of the spirit of the laws. This paper looks more closely at the heading of a particularly strategic chapter in L'Esprit des lois, 'De la constitution d'Angleterre' (XI, 6); the eight stages through which this astonishingly simple heading passed are like a journey, undertaken between 1739 and 1745. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the thirty-fourth annual conference and annual general meeting of the Scottish Legal History Group which was held on October 4, 2014 at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it also provides several abstracts of papers which were delivered at the event. Professor John Finlay's report entitled "Consulting Counsel in Eighteenth-Century Scotland" is mentioned, along with "Walter Scott and Scottish Judicature Reform 1806-10" by Dr. Kathryn Chittick.

Abstracts of papers delivered at the annual conference of the organization the Scottish Legal History Group on October 5, 2013, in Edinburgh, Scotland, are presented.

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium organized by professor Andrew Lewis at the City University in London, England is presented. The symposium aims to present some of the findings of professor Marin Dockray's research on the Zong case, and it explores the possibility of promoting publication of the materials which he had discovered.