This blog has a strong interest in the Enlightenment in all its facets, but particularly in Scotland. Adam Smith was one of the most important writers of the period whose works and thinking remain of the greatest importance, going beyond his historical epoch. In 2018, Jesse Norman published with Allen Lane his study Adam Smith: What he Thought, and Why it Matters . It was well and extensively reviewed. Amartya Sen commented in the book Norman “not only presents an excellent introduction to the life and ideas of Adam Smith, but also explains why–and how– Smith’s insights can help us solve some of the most difficult social and economic problems of the contemporary world.”  Simon Heffer’s review in The Spectator, for example, rightly emphasizes the extent to which Smith was a polymath and a student of human beings and society, not an economist in the modern narrow sense.

On Friday 6 March, the Law and Enlightenment LLM class with some friends in Edinburgh went on a walking tour to look at some places associated with the Enlightenment and the law in Edinburgh. The walk took in a discussion of the city walls and the gates, and why they were removed, as well as visiting Adam Smith’s final home< Panmure House, and his elegant grave, David Hume’s grave and where he had stayed in James’s Court and Riddle’s Court. The first places where law teaching took place were also pointed out, as well as some of the grander eighteenth-century homes. Here is the class outside Hume’s rather grand tomb.

Books are the lawyer’s tools and the law student’s laboratory, and nothing brings this home better than the marks that they leave in their books. Over 30 such annotated and inscribed books from the Lillian Goldman Law Library are on display in “Precedents So Scrawl’d and Blurr’d: Readers’ Marks in Law Books,” the Spring 2020 exhibition from the library’s Rare Book Collection.

The theme of this conference will be “Law and Constitutional Change”. The call for papers is now live on the BLHC website.