The Don-Wauchope Donation: the private law library of a leading family in Scots Law.
The Signet Library has received from the Don-Wauchope family the magnificent donation of about 100 historic law books dating from the eighteenth century or earlier and once professionally used by the Wauchope dynasty of Scots lawyers. The books have travelled to the Signet Library from Canada and are in superb original condition. The collection will undergo a process of cataloguing, cleaning and conservation before going on permanent display at the Signet Library.
Because Scotland is a Roman Law jurisdiction, this country on the very northern edge of Europe nevertheless has a legal memory that stretches beyond the Mediterranean into North Africa, and back more than two thousand years. The books, a rich mix of the best Roman Law of the early Enlightenment, Scots legal thinking under the Georgians and a spread of law reporting and legislation from both north and south of the Tweed, reflect this.
The collection presents the rare opportunity to study and analyse the library of a dynasty of Georgian lawyers. Members of the different branches of the Don and Wauchope families have graced the Writers to the Signet, the Faculty of Advocates and the Scottish Bench since the seventeenth century, and there is much to be learned about the thinking and practice of the time from a surviving library of this kind.
