Introduction to Session Papers

Pages from Signet Library Session Paper Volume 603 of 1788

Session Papers are the printed arguments written by Scotland’s advocates for deployment in civil law cases before the most senior court in Scotland, the Inner House of the Court of Session. In their original form as considered here they were in use from the early 1700s until the 1850 reform of the Court, although Session Papers of a kind continued to be produced thereafter.

Session Papers are amongst the most eloquent representatives of the extraordinary institutional memory of Scots law, a memory which extends over millennia in time and extends geographically across Europe, Turkey, the Levant and North Africa. They can be described as a manifestation of the national memory of Scotland. At the start of the eighteenth century, Scotland was a small, almost entirely rural nation perched on the northern edge of Europe. Under the terms of the 1707 Union with England, it kept its own church and legal system, and that legal system was based, not on English common law and equity, but on European Civil and Roman Law. The authorities open to citation by a Session Paper might be a recent case decided by the court - or it might be a passage from a text by a Dutch legal scholar of the seventeenth century, or from one of the great Roman jurists of two thousand years prior. Scotland’s mind and memory expressed through its law encompassed centuries of pan-European thought and culture, and felt itself to be part of a greater whole that took its foundations from the Constantinople of the Emperor Justinian.

Every Session Paper was the creation of an extraordinary and concentrated writing and publishing process, every part of which took place in a remarkably small geographical area despite their impact being felt nationally and abroad. The entire intense early life of a Session Paper - from its composition in manuscript by an advocate, through its nocturnal printing to its being read late at night by the judges, to the trial, took place often over a single 48 hour period, and within a territory that a contemporary could walk from end to end in ten minutes.

Few literary forms - and Session Papers did indeed constitute a known literary form - experience such substantial changes in their use, purpose and meaning over time. In material history terms, they are astonishing shape shifters, beginning as materials for individual court cases, evolving into a printed reference source of the legal arguments and positions of the day and eventually finding a new modern role as a rich historical primary source. Session Papers are also a literary form, that can claim amongst its authors some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and represent the application of Enlightenment ideas to the needs and experience of everyday life.

With Scotland’s executive (the King) departing for London after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and it’s legislature (Parliament) merged with that of England after 1707, Scotland’s judicature (the courts, advocates, solicitors and notaries) took on a far wider role in Scottish society than was the case elsewhere. The law courts of Scotland touched on every part of society and every issue of life. The Scottish Session Papers hold up a mirror to this remarkable Enlightenment Society: truly, all of life is here.