Stair Society Articles Directory

Although, from the 1870s, we can trace a growing role of statutory regulation in the fields of public and occupational health, as well as growing intervention through what was known as ‘municipal socialism’, for most of the century, government remained small and non-interventionist. The economy operated within a structure of private-law rules which were not for the most part the stuff of high political debate, but were determined by judges and jurists in the courtroom and classroom, or by law reformers seeking to alter particular legal regimes. These rules were not static, providing a simple unchanging framework within which the economy would operate: they changed and developed significantly in the course of the century. The aim of this article is to explore some of these changes in the private-law thinking of the judges of Westminster Hall, and the influences which shaped them.

This article examines the textual traditionof Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland with particularreference to his title ‘OfLiberty and Servitude’. It first catalogues the manuscript copies of Stair’s Institutions known to be held in Scottish libraries. The article thereafter examines the nature of the manuscript tradition, taking account of scribal practice and the circulationof manuscript texts in the seventeenth century.

In an earlier article’ the author undertook a selective review of the history of The Stair Society during its formative years, from its inauguration in 1934 up to 1947. In this article, again reviewing the administrative records which have been placed in the custody of the National Library of Scotland, he considers aspects of the development of the Society over the following twenty years, up to 1967.

When Shepherd & Wedderburn handed on the administration of the Society’s affairs to Chiene &Tait in 2004, the records, which had lain largely undisturbed for many years, were withdrawn from storage and placed into the custody of the National Library of Scotland along with the Literary Directors’ files covering the period since the 1970s. The administrative records provide a comprehensive view of the formation and history of the Society. This paper is a selection of what a dip into the early years of the archive produced.