The Stair Society: Scotland’s Legal History Society

Stair Society Lectures

The first occasion of an address being given at an AGM was in 1946. Professor A H Campbell, Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations in the University of Edinburgh, spoke on Jurisprudence and its Relevance to the Law of Scotland in a Historical Context.

Our Annual Lecture was inaugurated in 1965, when Jack Halliday, Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Glasgow, delivered an address entitled A Lawyer Looks at Stair.

A lecture has been delivered every year since then, as the focal point of our annual meeting. Lecturers have included, and continue to include, lawyers and legal historians of distinction from Europe and the United States as well as from Scotland and England, and many of their lecture texts have been published.

2022

Professor Alice Taylor, Professor of Medieval History, Kings College London

2014

Professor Alain Wijffels, Professor at Leuven, Kortrijk, Louvain-la-Neuve, Lille, and Leiden Universities

Published as ‘Legal authorities as instruments of conflict management: the long endgame of Anglo-Hanseatic relations (1474–1603)’ in M. Godfrey (ed), Law and Authority in British Legal History (CUP 2016).

2023 Stair Society Annual Lecture

The Stair Society’s Annual General Meeting will be held in theMackenzie Building, Old Assembly Close, Edinburgh on Saturday 18 November 2023 by courtesy of the Faculty of Advocates. For members, the business part of the meeting will take placefrom 10:30 to 11:00am, after which tea and coffee will be servedprior

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