Alleged Copyright Theft by Founders of Encyclopaedia Britannica Among Stories Revealed

Thirty years after the University of Virginia School of Law acquired a trove of legal documents from Scotland’s Court of Session, the supreme legal court there, the Law School’s Arthur J. Morris Law Library is building a digital archive and reaching out to partners “across the pond” to open these legal history materials to scholars and the public.

Litigation documents are the “meat and potatoes” of our Scottish Court of Session Records (1759-1834), but the collection is also peppered with testimony, letters, wills, contracts, and other evidence offered by lawyers to help prove their cases. These records preserve the voices of ordinary people—including women, servants, and Erse-speakers,[1] among others—and tell stories that might otherwise have been lost to history.