Forbes' Institutes of the Law of Scotland (Reprint of 1st edition)

William Forbes was the first holder of the Regius Chair of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow. His Institutes of the Law of Scotland, published in two parts in 1722 and 1730, has long since been unobtainable and known only to specialists. The present volume thus makes available for the first time since the eighteenth century a work of considerable interest and importance. Forbes’ Institutes fills a gap in our knowledge of Scots law between the writings of Stair and Mackenzie towards the end of the seventeenth century and those of Bankton and Erskine in the middle of the eighteenth. It also makes more accessible the content of Forbes’ much larger and wholly unpublished work, A Great Body of the Law of Scotland (of which the Institutes is largely a summary), which has lain almost unread in Glasgow University Library but is now available online. Forbes intended the Institutes as a definitive statement of private and criminal law at a time when, following the 1707 Union, they might appear to be under significant threat. There is still much which can be learned from it today.

This edition contains an Introduction by Professor Hector MacQueen.