Bell’s Commentaries reborn

February 2024 saw the publication of the latest output of a long-running collaboration between the Signet Library and the Edinburgh Legal Education Trust, beginning in 2010 and overseeing the publication under the imprint “Old Studies in Scots Law” of an important series of facsimile reprints of the Institutional Writers of Scots law.

Each reprinted work is a facsimile copy of a Signet Library original accompanied by a scholarly introduction, with the Trust funding the conservation and restoration of the original. The latest work to appear through the scheme is the sixth in the series and is a reprint of the 1826 5th edition of George Joseph Bell’s Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland, the last to be produced by Bell himself, and like the original it is published in two volumes.