Charles Areskine’s Library: Scottish Lawyers and Their Books at the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2016)
In Charles Areskine’s Library, Karen Baston uses a detailed study of an eighteenth-century Scottish advocate’s private book collection to explore key themes in the Scottish Enlightenment including secularisation, modernisation, internationalisation, and the development of legal literature in Scotland. By exploring a surviving manuscript dated 1731that lists a Scottish lawyer’s library, Karen Baston demonstrates that the books Charles Areskine owned, used in practice, and read for pleasure embedded him in the intellectual culture that expanded in early eighteenth-century Scotland. Areskine and his fellow advocates emerged as scholarly and sociable gentlemen who led their nation. Lawyers were integral to and integrated with the Scottish society that allowed the Scottish Enlightenment to take root and flourish within Areskine’s lifetime.
The Roman Law Library of Alan Ferguson Rodger, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, with a Bibliography of His Works by Karen Baston and Ernest Metzger (Glasgow: Traditio Iuris Romani, 2012)
Alan Rodger, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry (1944–2011), Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, assembled one of the largest private collections of Roman law works in the world: more than 1,300 treatises, monographs, texts and references works. This volume contains a catalogue of every work, annotated with provenance details, biographical notes on previous owners, and comments by Lord Rodger. This volume also contains a bibliography of Lord Rodger’s publications, and essays on his life and work.