Collection of Case Papers of the Scottish Court of Session

The UVA Session Papers collection originally belonged to lawyer Andrew Skene, who was born in 1784 and served as Scotland’s Solicitor General from 1834 until his death in 1835. Many of these documents include his handwritten, and often lengthy, annotations on the content and judgments for individual cases. Skene likely enlarged his own library by acquiring Session papers from other personal collections. The earliest documents in UVA’s collection predate Skene’s legal career and include the annotations of other Scottish jurists, such as William Craig, lawyer and judge from 1768 to 1812.

William Craig, Lord Craig (1745-1813), began assembling this collection as an advocate, and later a judge, on the Court of Session in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The papers apparently passed to Andrew Skene after Craig's death. Skene (1784-1834) also worked as an advocate and later briefly served as Scotland's solicitor general. He greatly expanded Craig's original collection. When Skene died in 1835 the papers were sold in an estate sale, after which the Library of the Society of Advocates in Aberdeen, Scotland, came into possession of them. The Library sold them, along with many of their manuscript collections, in the 1980s. The UVA Law Library purchased the records in 1986.