Edinburgh Law
School’s second oldest Chair
filled by Professor John W. Cairns
The University of Edinburgh Law School is pleased to
announce that its established Chair in Civil Law has been filled by Professor John W.
Cairns, FRSE. Dating from 1710, the Chair of Civil Law is the second
oldest chair in Law and one of the most prestigious chairs in Civil Law in the
United Kingdom.
It has been held by a series of distinguished
scholars including Sir Thomas (T.B.) Smith and Alan Watson, and was most recently occupied by Peter Birks, who vacated the chair in 1987 and
subsequently became Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford.
A graduate of the University
of Edinburgh, Professor Cairns was
Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Queen's University Belfast before returning to Edinburgh to hold the
posts of lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and eventually the Chair of Legal
History in 2000. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Miami
(1988, 1991, 1995) and Southern Methodist University (1986). He held the office
of Associate Dean (Postgraduate)/Director of the Graduate School
in Law from 2000-2003. From 1996-2003 Professor Cairns was Book Review Editor of the Edinburgh
Law Review and he has served on the editorial boards and committees of a
number of legal history periodicals. He was consultant on Scots Law to the
Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, and since 1998 has been Chairman of
the Council of the Stair Society. From 2006 to 2008 Professor Cairns was
president of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society; he continues on
its Board. In 2008, he became a founding member of the Advisory Board of
the Alan Watson Foundation. He is a member of the Peer Review
College of the AHRC. His current major research interests are legal
theory and legal education in the Scottish Enlightenment; slavery and law in
eighteenth-century Scotland;
and the legal histories of Scotland
and Louisiana,
publishing extensively in all. He has recently been involved in a
research network that drafted guidelines on the interpretation of slavery in
international law.
Along with
filling the Chair in Civil Law, Edinburgh
Law School
is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Guido Rossi as lecturer in Legal
History. Dr.
Rossi studied law in Italy
and England.
He holds a PhD in Political Economy and Law from Pavia
(Italy) and has recently
completed a PhD in Legal History at the University of Cambridge.
He specialises in late medieval ius commune and early modern mercantile
law and is currently researching on mercantile customs in Britain and
Continental Europe during the sixteenth century.
These two appointments reflect the
School’s continuing commitment to Legal History and Civil Law and will
strengthen and broaden its research and teaching in these fields under the
aegis of the School’s active Centre for Legal History.
Follow the Centre for Legal History on Twitter @CentreLegalHist
For further information please contact: Simone Hull, Communications Officer, tel
(0)131 651 4226; email simone.hull@ed.ac.uk
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