William Scott, who became Lord Stowell in 1821, was born in 1745, the son of a Newcastle coal fitter. Unlike his better known younger brother John, later Lord Eldon, who achieved both fame and notoriety in the Court of Chancery, William, though he kept his terms at an Inn of Court, became a civil lawyer, practising from Doctor’s Commons. He was indeed the last major figure in the English civilian tradition, and in some sense the greatest of them. The civilians, as a distinct profession of practising lawyers, were not to survive the 19th century, and since their demise the study of the civil law in England has become wholly historical in character. Their extinction was so effectively carried out that in my time the Oxford Law Faculty put out a brochure announcing that the faculty had been created in the 1850s, and even declined to alter it when this incredible error was pointed out. William Scott’s legal education as a civilian was in that law school, and he obtained his D.C.L. from the University in 1779. Probably he attended Blackstone’s extra-curricular lectures on the common law, but there is no direct evidence of this. For some time before he came to rely wholly upon practice as a civilian, he indeed taught in Oxford, not, however, as a civil lawyer, but as Camden Reader in Ancient History. In the 1780s, however, he became increasingly involved in practice in the ecclesiastical courts and court of admiralty, the principal activities still open to a civilian, and began to acquire associated offices, such as judge of the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court (1778) and advocate for the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty (1782). In 1798 he became judge of the High Court of Admiralty, an office he held until 1828, when he resigned at the age of 82; he lived for another eight years, dying in 1836 at the age of 90. In his long tenure of judicial office he built up a very considerable reputation.

It is this judicial reputation and achievement which is the subject-matter of Professor Bourguignon’s erudite, original and very readable book, which takes us back on a fascinating excursion into the lost world of the tiny coterie of lawyers who practised the civil law in England. It is not a general biography of Scott’s life or career, though it includes a fairly brief biographical sketch, which has some discussion of William’s relations with his brother. Furthermore, certain types of case are excluded from the analysis—slave cases and criminal cases. Their inclusion would have required a general discussion of the history of slavery and criminal law for the discussion to have a proper context. And, since the history of the court is not well known, and Professor Bourguignon is anxious to place Scott’s judicial work in the history of admiralty jurisdiction generally, he provides a lucid short account of the development and severe curtailing of the jurisdiction of the court, and of the rivalry between the civilians and the common lawyers.

By the 18th century the regular civil litigation within what was known as the instance jurisdiction of the court covered a very narrow field—suits for mariners’ wages, for the possession of vessels, disputes arising out of bottomry bonds, rarely occurring litigation over collisions on the high seas (for ships did not often collide on the high seas), some few personal injury actions (which might arise out of chastisement of sailors) and some salvage cases. Large areas of jurisdiction—for example, litigation over title to vessels, or charterparties—had long been acquired by the common law. What little was left of the instance jurisdiction could