Contract before the Enlightenment, which will be released on 23 March, explores the development and reception of his ideas relating to the law of contract on the eve the Scottish Enlightenment.

It is here that Stair’s legal legacy is most evident and where the imprint of Calvinism, Aristotelianism and Protestant natural law can be found within Scottish legal thought.

In his legal treatise, the Institutions of Law of Scotland you find a sophisticated, innovative, and novel synthesis of Roman law with Stair’s own Calvinist variant of a Protestant natural law theory. Yet it is also possible to find, once the theistic premises of Stair’s natural law theory are dropped, the beginnings of a form of Scottish moral philosophy which rose to prominence in the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly, Stair is a key figure within Scottish legal history but as this study demonstrates he is significant to how we understand the transition of Scottish intellectual life from the execution of Charles I to the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Mr Bogle is a senior lecturer in private law at the University of Glasgow. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2005 with an MA (Mental Philosophy) before commencing his LLB at the University of Strathclyde (2007). After qualifying as a solicitor in Scotland (2010), he returned to the University of Edinburgh to do both his LLM by Research (2012) and PhD (2016).