Thanks to a research grant from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the UVA Law Special Collections teams has just returned from a successful trip to Edinburgh, Scotland to identify early American-centered Court of Session cases at the Signet Library, the Advocates Library, and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections (CRC).
Drs. James Ambuske, Randi Flaherty, and Loren Moulds, who are co-directors of the Law Library’s Scottish Court of Session Project, reviewed roughly 1500 cases at each repository and cast a wide net to note cases dealing with North and South America, the Caribbean, and the broader Atlantic world. These materials lacked a pre-exiting robust catalog and had not yet been digitized. In total, we found 419 cases related to the Atlantic World or the Americas. We hope to use this cataloge of cases to work with our CRC partners and schedule these materials for future digitization.
The results of our research confirmed for us the significant role these Session Papers can play in driving new legal history scholarship. At the CRC we found cases involving the mahogany trade to Honduras, for example. Like similar cases in the Library of Congress’s Session Papers collection that are now available digitally on our website, these Honduras cases included printed ship logs and other correspondence that may be the only surviving copies of these records. At the Signet Library, we found many cases involving Jamaica. While there has been a great deal of scholarship on Scotland and Jamaica, only a handful of works make use of Session Papers or look at the transatlantic legal ties between Jamaica and Scotland. We think these documents will raise important new questions. Also at the Signet Library, we encountered several different copies, each with different marginal notes, of the famous Knight v. Wedderburn (1778) case, in which the Court of Session ruled that slavery had no foundation in Scots Law. One set of documents contained a handwritten record of the judges's words as they issued their opinions in the case. At the Advocates Library we found a number of cases relating to the Carolinas, Newfoundland, Jamaica, and Virginia, including an insurance fraud case that spanned 40 years and involved deponents, litigants, and ports in Scotland, Virginia, Bermuda, and beyond. As far as we can determine, it was never listed in any case report. The UVA Law Library collection of Session Papers has one single document from this case, but Cromwell funds allowed our team to identify this larger trove of case materials.
Extract of logbook from ship Midsummer Blossom, which traveled from Hondurus to London in 1801. Included as an appendix to a petition in the case of Clark v. Watson, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh.
An 1805 petition in the case of Clark v. Watson, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh.
All of these discoveries highlight the important role collaboration and digital cataloging can play in reassembling disbursed case documents. On that theme, we also spent part of our Edinburgh trip meeting face-to-face with our partners at the CRC. We came to agreements regarding the sharing of data, a common metadata scheme to describe our respective documents, and methods to more efficiently pass data between our two sides. To date we have digitized 26,000 pages of Session Papers in our collection at the UVA Law Library, and the discussions and decisions that came out of these Edinburgh meetings will allow us to move forward with plans to redesign our project database and public-facing website. In particular, we hope to incorporate new metadata schemes that curate this content according to current interests in the field of legal history.
