A recent donation to the Signet Library gives a rare insight into the very beginnings of professional legal education in Scotland. A gift to the Society by David MacLennan WS, advocate John Cuninghame’s pamphlet Discourse at the Beginnings of his Lessons Upon the Scots Law was published in 1705 and marked the beginning of private legal classes by a handful of advocates that preceded the founding of the first Chair in Jurisprudence in Glasgow a decade later. The pamphlet (which is exceptionally scarce and amongst the very rarest items in the Signet Library’s collections) introduces the reader to fundamental Scots Law concepts and prepares the ground for deeper understanding. The work by Cuninghame and his colleagues in re-establishing academic legal education in Scotland was an important setting of the scene for the foundation of the Signet Library in 1722 and everything that followed from it.
