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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.

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.

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]