In the late Middle Ages, justice in Scotland was a mixture of the royal and local, which was often unsystematic with overlapping jurisdictions, undertaken by clerical lawyers, laymen, amateurs and local leaders.Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625, pp. 24–5. Under James IV the legal functions of the council were rationalised, with a royal Court of Session meeting daily in Edinburgh to deal with civil cases. In 1514 the office of justice-general was created for the earl of Argyll (and held by his family until 1628). The study of law was popular in Scotland from the Middle Ages and many students travelled to Continental Europe to study canon law and civil law.K. Reid and R. Zimmerman, A History of Private Law in Scotland: I. Introduction and Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), , p. 68. In 1532 the Royal College of Justice was founded, leading to the training and professionalisation of an emerging group of career lawyers. The Court of Session placed increasing emphasis on its independence from influence, including from the king, and superior jurisdiction over local justice. Its judges were increasingly able to control entry to their own ranks. In 1605 the professionalisation of the bench led to entry requirements in Latin, law and a property qualification of £2,000, designed to limit the danger of bribery, helping to create an exclusive, wealthy, powerful and professional caste, who also now dominated government posts in a way that the clergy had done in the Middle Ages.Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625, pp. 154–5. In 1672 the High Court of Justiciary was founded from the College of Justice as a supreme court of appeal. The Act of Union in 1707 largely persevered the distinct Scottish legal system and its courts, separate from English jurisdiction.Anne-Marie Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (Boydell & Brewer, 2007), , p. 29. The major reform to Scottish law came as a result of the Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1747, which was part of the government reaction to the Jacobite rising of 1745 and which limited the powers of burgh courts, abolished hereditary offices and made the barony and regality courts obsolete, strengthening the reach of the central judicial courts.Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, p. 31.
