This Blog is pleased to note the publication of Law and Legal Consciousness in Medieval Scotland by Hector MacQueen, Professor Emeritus of Private Law in the University of Edinburgh. It is published by Brill in both E-book (ISBN 978-90-04-68376-1) and Hardback format (ISBN 978-90-04-51228-3) at €163.00 in its series Medieval Law and Its Practice.
Professor MacQueen is the foremost historian of medieval Scots law, and indeed the prominent leader in Scottish legal history more generally. This standing was quickly established from the writing of his thesis under the supervision of W. David H. Sellar and Geoffrey Barrow, published as Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland in 1993, reprinted as an Edinburgh Classic in 2016, with a foreword by Andrew Simpson, who quoted the late Alan Harding’s just remark remark that the work ‘one of [the] most penetrating studies yet produced of any period of Scottish legal history’.
Though Common Law and Feudal Society is work of immense importance, Professor MacQueen has written other penetrating studies of medieval Scots law in chapters, essays and articles in which he has reframed and reformed our understanding of medieval Scots law through profound reflection and research. I have not checked the number, but the majority of these have now been gathered, some revised, in the new book.
This new collection along with the published version of his thesis give the definitive account of law in medieval Scotland.
