James VI and I was the first king personally to act as a judge in both Scotland and England. He was also the last king to sit as a judge in either country. Although James did not sit as a judge frequently, he did so on several occasions. James’s ideas about the king as a judge were disseminated in his speeches and printed works. This material has not been used by historians, despite the importance contemporaries attached to some of James’s appearances as a judge. This paper investigates James’s judicial role. It compares both James’s judicial activity in his two realms and James’s ideas of the king as judge to his practice of judging.

This paper discusses Regiam Maiestatem, known by the mid-fifteenth century to constitute much of Scotland’s ‘ancient law’.Although it was used and cited as an authority of Scotland’s common law into the modern period, Regiam has an unusually controversial past. It is currently understood to have been compiled during the reign of Robert I (1306–29), during Scotland’s ‘wars of independence’ with England, although much of its material is based on the late twelfth-century English legal tractate known as Glanvill. As a result of the relationship between it and Glanvill, Regiam has been both dismissed as constituting ’no part’ of Scots law and as providing evidence for the shared legal framework of Scotland and England. Yet it remains a remarkably understudied work in itself, partly because of its complicated manuscript tradition and its confused and often conflicting readings. This lecture offers a new interpretation of Regiam’s intended purpose by situating it in the context of later thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century political thought and, in so doing, offers a different interpretation of the intellectual underpinnings and practice of Robert I’s kingship.

This chapter chronologically traces past legal engagement with the human embryo, from the 13th century, to the end of the 20th century. It does so with a view to demonstrating that a historical perspective is required to understand that process is a key facet of law-making in this area. Notable from this legal history is the law’s persistent efforts to engage with the embryo’s uncertain, processual nature. We cannot fully understand our present legal position without understanding the social, moral, and legal context from which it was born. By looking at the past ‘legal embryo,’ we can see how the law has reached today’s ‘legal embryo’.