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The Centre for Scots Law is pleased to invite you to the first seminar for Term 1 in 2026-27. Our speaker is Dr Jonathan Brown, lecturer in law at the University of Strathclyde, who will be presenting on: “Frequent and Curious Among the English; But With Us… Little Accustomed to be Pursued”: “Actions Upon Injurious Words” and “Damnage and Means” in Early Modern and Modern Scots Law.

All are welcome to attend, particularly those with an interest in private law, legal history and media law. Please note that the seminar will be hosted in Rm C49 and on Teams.

Dr Brown has provided the following abstract:

The titular quotation is taken from the Institutions of Viscount Stair (1st edn. 1681; 2nd edn. 1693). It is often said, and not without reason, that anyone who wishes to understand the Scots law of obligations must start with Stair. Yet at the time that Stair wrote, and indeed at the time that his works were published, there were no (enduring or widely-circulated) newspapers in Scotland. The nation had, by his day, developed a legal system which comfortably fit within the broader intellectual tradition of the Continental European ius commune.

The ius commune jurists, having largely written before newspapers became widespread and significant, had nothing to say about them. From the mid-Eighteenth Century on however, the preponderance of Scots cases concerned with hurtful and damaging words came to concern material published in newspapers. As Blackie observed, this indirectly led to a fundamental change in the perception – and so eventually the practice – of the law in Scotland. This shift was ultimately to the detriment of the overall coherence of Scots law: much of the old ius commune learning possesses many useful lessons that could have informed reform of the law of defamation in the Twenty-First Century.

Bearing this in mind, the present enquiry considers the ongoing relevance of some of that old learning, unpacking what, precisely, Stair meant by the titular quotation and examining how it was that the emergence of newspapers and mass media came to significantly change the law of ‘verbal injury’ in Scotland.”