Institutions · No. 33 of 50 · Government

The Faculty of Advocates

One bar, one library, one Dean. Scotland’s advocates are not simply barristers with a different name — and the famous date on the tin, 1532, is the founding of the court they pleaded in, not of the Faculty itself.

Roots 1532 · Organised body from the later 1500sParliament House, EdinburghReading time · 15 minUpdated 14 September 2026

TL;DR

The Faculty of Advocates is the professional body of every Scottish advocate. Its own official history says only that it “dates back to” the founding of the College of Justice in 1532 — a deliberately hedged phrase, because the advocates of 1532 were the forerunners of a corporate Faculty that took shape gradually across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The markers of that gradual emergence are documentary: the first recorded Dean is dated 1582, and the Faculty’s own minute books begin only in 1661. This card therefore carries a traditional claim status rather than an established one.
It is genuinely different from the English bar: one Faculty, not four Inns of Court, a shared collective home and library at Parliament House, and advocates grouped into “stables” rather than chambers.
Its members shaped Scottish culture far beyond law. David Hume was Keeper of the Advocates Library from 1752 to 1757 and began his History of England there; Walter Scott, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson were all advocates.
Current scale, on 2024 Faculty figures: 555 practising members, including 135 practising King’s Counsel, with about 29 per cent of the practising bar women.

Key Findings

1532 is the court’s founding, not the Faculty’s. The College of Justice Act 1532 and the papal bull of September 1531 created the court; the advocates admitted to plead before it are the origin point the Faculty points to.
The Faculty’s own wording is careful, and repeating it accurately is the whole discipline of this card: it “dates back to” 1532, with individual advocates “probably working in the courts even earlier”.
Scholarship has downgraded 1532, in the ODNB’s own phrase, and treats the corporate Faculty as something that emerged rather than something founded.
The documentary spine runs 1582 to 1661: first recorded Dean, then the opening of the Faculty’s own minutes.
Numbers grew past every cap: ten advocates permitted at foundation, around 54 by 1587, a formal cap of 50 in 1590 that was soon exceeded.
Admission requirements were built up over centuries, from the 1610 petition through the 1619 Civil Law thesis to the 1750 Scots law examination.
The England contrast is structural, not merely verbal — one Faculty, one library, stables, an elected Dean, a separate qualification route.
The Parlement of Paris story is a myth, traceable to Mackenzie and dismantled by Hannay in 1922.

Quick Facts

Institution: The Faculty of Advocates — the professional body of the Scottish bar
Traditional origin: 1532, the founding of the College of Justice (the court, not the Faculty)
First recorded Dean: John Sharp, dated 1582 — on limited sourcing
Own minute books begin: 1661
Home: Parliament House, Edinburgh, with the Advocates Library
Head: The Dean of Faculty, elected by the members
Members (2024): 555 practising advocates, of whom 151 (about 29%) are women
King's Counsel (2024): 135 practising KCs, of whom 31 (23%) are women
Structure: One Faculty, not four Inns of Court; advocates grouped in “stables”
Working rule: Self-employed, no partnerships, instructed by solicitors, cab-rank principle
Regulation: Self-regulating under the supervision of the Lord President; delegated by the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010
Sister body: The Law Society of Scotland (1949) for solicitors — a separate, much larger profession

Scottish Impact Index (SI Score)

Societal Impact: 4/10
Institutional Longevity: 9/10
Material Contribution: 3/10
Institutional Distinctiveness: 4/10
Systemic Legacy: 4/10
Recognition: 2/10

26/60

Ranked #48 of 50 in Institutions

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1. The 1532 Question

In September 1531 Pope Clement VII issued a bull clearing the way for a permanent central civil court in Scotland. The following year the College of Justice Act 1532 created it, and James V’s new College of Justice — the institution that became the Court of Session — began to sit. Only ten advocates were permitted to plead before it. Those men, and the procurators alongside them, are the ancestors of today’s Faculty of Advocates.

That is a genuine origin, and nobody disputes it. What does not follow is the sentence you will see almost everywhere: the Faculty of Advocates, founded 1532. The Faculty itself does not say that. Its official history says the Faculty “as a body dates back to the foundation of the College of Justice in 1532, although individual Advocates were probably working in the courts even earlier”. Encyclopaedia Britannica hedges in the same direction: the Faculty “grew out of the Scots Act of 1532”.

Read those two formulations closely and the same careful move appears in both. Something existed in 1532. It was not yet the Faculty.

The distinction that matters

On most cards in this collection, a solid founding date carries an inflated superlative on top of it. Here it is the date itself that is loose. The Faculty is not in doubt; the year is a tradition. That is why the claim status on this card reads traditional rather than established.

2. How the Faculty Coalesced

The modern scholarship is consistent, and it is not shy. John Finlay, in Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (2000), calls the 1532 procurators the “forerunners” of the “later Faculty of Advocates”. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in its group entry on the “procurators of the College of Justice (act. 1532)”, records that “the precise significance of this event has been a matter of historical debate” and that scholarship has produced “a downgrading of the events of 1532”. W. C. Wilson, writing on the Scottish bar in the Louisiana Law Review in 1968, notes that “the development of the corporate existence of the faculty can be traced with reasonable accuracy and it is clear that the present specialisation of function did not always exist”. N. T. Phillipson framed the Faculty’s identity as something that emerged as a professional corporation across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Against that background, two dates do more work than 1532. The first recorded Dean of Faculty is John Sharp, dated 1582 — fifty years after the court was founded. And the Faculty’s own institutional minute books begin in 1661. A body with a head and a written record of its own decisions is recognisably the Faculty; before that, the record shows a growing group of practitioners around a court.

Growth is easier to trace than incorporation. Ten advocates were permitted at the court’s foundation. The limit was soon exceeded. By 1587 — the year advocates were first allowed to appear in treason and criminal cases — the body comprised around 54 practitioners, and a formal cap raised to 50 in 1590 was itself overtaken. An institution that keeps outgrowing its own ceilings is an institution becoming a profession.

3. Admission, Then and Now

For long stretches of its history the Faculty required no set course of study whatever. In 1610 it petitioned that nobody be admitted without university study of philosophy plus two years of law, or seven years under an experienced advocate. By an Act of Sederunt of 12 February 1619 an examination and thesis in Civil — Roman — law became the ordinary route to admission, and an Act of Sederunt of 28 February 1750 made examination in Scots law necessary as well. The final ceremony traditionally required the candidate to deliver a Latin oration on a text of the Corpus Juris Civilis, wearing a hat. It was dispensed with in the early nineteenth century.

The modern route is longer and less Latin. It normally requires an LLB in Scots law and the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Dundee, Aberdeen or Robert Gordon; then matriculation as an “Intrant”, a period in a solicitor’s office, and a roughly nine-month unpaid pupillage called “devilling” under a devilmaster, beginning each October with a foundation course. Intrants sit Faculty examinations and an aptitude test before being called and petitioning the Court of Session for admission to the public office of advocate. Senior advocates may in time be appointed King’s Counsel — “taking Silk”.

The classic statement of what admission commits an advocate to comes from Batchelor v. Pattison & Mackersy (1876): an advocate “takes on himself an office in the performance of which he owes a duty, not to his client only, but also to the Court, to the Members of his own profession, and to the public”.

4. Not Simply Scottish Barristers

The functional comparison is fair. Advocates, like barristers, are specialist court pleaders with rights of audience in the higher courts. They are instructed by solicitors rather than engaged directly by clients in most work — the referral bar model — are self-employed, are prohibited from forming partnerships, and work under the cab-rank principle. They appear in every Scottish court, including the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, and in the UK Supreme Court.

The institutional comparison is where the lazy equation breaks down:

England and Wales: a barrister must belong to one of four Inns of Court — Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn — is called to the Bar by their Inn, and usually works from independent chambers.
Scotland: every advocate belongs to the single Faculty, is called by the Faculty with the Court of Session admitting them to public office, shares the Advocates Library, and is grouped into a “stable” served by Faculty Services Limited. The head is the elected Dean of Faculty, compared by one scholar to the French bâtonnier, who takes precedence within the bar even over the Lord Advocate.

Add that Scotland has a separate legal system with a separate qualification route — an English law degree does not qualify a person for the Scottish bar — and “advocates are just the Scottish word for barristers” turns out to be a translation of a job title mistaken for a description of an institution.

5. The Advocates Library

Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636/38–1691), Lord Advocate, legal author and — for his prosecution of Covenanters — “Bluidy Mackenzie”, was Dean of Faculty from 1682 to 1689. As Dean he drove the creation of the Advocates Library, delivering its inaugural Latin oration on 15 March 1689; the Faculty’s own formulation is that the Library “dates from 1689”.

What the Faculty built as a working law library became one of the intellectual engines of the Scottish Enlightenment. The philosopher David Hume was its Keeper from 1752 to 1757; the National Library of Scotland records that while Keeper “he began to write his multi-volume best-seller ‘The history of England’”, working among a collection of some 30,000 volumes. Hume was styled “master of 30,000 volumes”. The Select Society, founded in 1754 by the painter Allan Ramsay, met in the Library; its members included Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and Hugh Blair. Thomas Ruddiman had been an earlier notable Keeper.

By the 1850s the Library was in effect Scotland’s national library. In 1925, in the Faculty’s own words, “the Faculty gifted to the nation some 750,000 non-legal books, pamphlets, maps and sheet music, and the National Library of Scotland was established”. The Faculty kept its legal collections; the rest became a public institution. That story belongs to the National Library card on this site, which governs it.

6. Notable Advocates and Deans

Henry Erskine (1746–1817) — admitted advocate 1768, Lord Advocate 1783–84 and 1806–07, Dean from 1785 and re-elected annually until he was deposed on 12 January 1796 in favour of Robert Dundas of Arniston, after publicly opposing the government’s sedition and treason bills. He defended Deacon Brodie in 1788. Robert Burns wrote a ballad, “The Dean of Faculty”, about the vote that removed him.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850) — admitted 1794, co-founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, elected Dean in 1829 and retiring from the Review on election; later Lord Advocate and a judge. As a critic he greeted Wordsworth’s Excursion with “This will never do”.
David Hume, advocate (1757–1838) — nephew of the philosopher, admitted 1779, Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh, and author of the Commentaries on the Law of Scotland, Respecting Trial for Crimes (1797), still cited today. He must not be confused with his uncle.
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) — passed the Faculty’s Scots law examination and was admitted on 11 July 1792. He practised modestly before literature took over, and later served as Clerk of Session.
James Boswell (1740–1795) — advocate, diarist, and biographer of Samuel Johnson.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) — passed the entrance examinations on 14 July 1875 and was admitted advocate on 16 July 1875. He never practised, but continued to describe himself as “advocate of the Scots Bar”.
Early Deans in the standard list include John Nisbet (1655), George Lockhart (1672), Sir John Dalrymple (1680, 1690) and Hew Dalrymple (1695–98).

7. The Parlement of Paris Myth

The court the Faculty grew up around is regularly said to have been modelled on the Parlement of Paris. It was not, and the trail of the claim is instructive. It originates with Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh in his Institutions — the Faculty’s own great Dean, as it happens — was repeated by Erskine and by later historians, and was pointedly ignored by Stair, the most authoritative institutional writer of the period.

R. K. Hannay, in “On the Antecedents of the College of Justice” (1922, reprinted by the Stair Society in 1990), argued that the court was an indigenous growth out of the Scottish curia regis and centuries of conciliar “sessions”, and that the 1532 foundation was “the inevitable end of a long development”. Hannay observed that “the popular account of the matter appears to rest upon a statement by Sir George Mackenzie”, and that the modelling claim “was significantly ignored by Stair”.

The point is narrow and should stay narrow. Nobody denies the general influence of French and Roman legal learning on Scots law; the Civil Law thesis required for admission from 1619 is proof enough of it. What is unsupported is the specific story of one institution being copied from another. The Scotland’s Supreme Courts card sets the same correction out at length.

8. The Modern Faculty

The Faculty is self-regulating but not unsupervised: it operates subject to the overriding supervision of the Lord President of the Court of Session, and its regulatory responsibilities are delegated under the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010. It is led by elected office-bearers — the Dean, Vice-Dean, Treasurer, Clerk and Keeper of the Library, plus the chairman of Faculty Services Limited — who consult an elected Faculty Council. The current Dean is Roddy Dunlop KC, elected in July 2020 in succession to Gordon Jackson KC. Clerking and administration run through Faculty Services Limited, and the Faculty runs a Free Legal Services Unit.

On scale, the figures to use are the Faculty’s own for 2024, as cited in the Scottish Government’s Appointment of King’s Counsel in Scotland 2025: 555 practising members, of whom 151 — about 29 per cent — are women, including 135 practising King’s Counsel, of whom 31 (23 per cent) are women. Older secondary figures of “just over 460” practising members, or a total of “730”, count different things or report earlier years, and are not used here. The Faculty’s base remains Parliament House in Edinburgh.

Alongside it stands the other half of a divided profession. Solicitors are represented and regulated by the Law Society of Scotland, established by statute in 1949 with its rules now in the Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1980, and describing itself as the professional body for over 14,000 Scottish solicitors. Solicitors instruct advocates for higher-court work; solicitor-advocates, a later development, can obtain extended rights of audience themselves. The pattern rhymes with England’s barrister and solicitor split without being identical to it.

Timeline

Sep 1531
Papal bull of Clement VII
Clears the way for a permanent central civil court in Scotland
1532
College of Justice Act
The court is founded; ten advocates are permitted to plead before it
1582
First recorded Dean of Faculty
John Sharp — the earliest name in the standard dean list
1587
Advocates admitted in treason and criminal cases
The body has grown to around 54 practitioners
1590
Formal cap set at 50
Soon exceeded in practice
1610
Faculty petitions on qualifications
University philosophy plus two years of law, or seven years under an advocate
12 Feb 1619
Act of Sederunt on admission
Examination and thesis in Civil (Roman) Law becomes the ordinary route
1661
The Faculty's own minute books open
The first continuous institutional record of the body itself
1682–89
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh as Dean
Drives the creation of the Advocates Library
15 Mar 1689
Inaugural oration for the Library
The Faculty dates the Advocates Library from 1689
28 Feb 1750
Act of Sederunt on Scots law
Examination in Scots law becomes necessary for admission
1752–57
David Hume as Keeper of the Library
Begins his History of England among some 30,000 volumes
1792
Walter Scott called to the bar
Admitted advocate on 11 July
12 Jan 1796
Henry Erskine deposed as Dean
After opposing the sedition and treason bills; Burns writes a ballad about the vote
1829
Francis Jeffrey elected Dean
Leaves the editorship of the Edinburgh Review on election
16 Jul 1875
Robert Louis Stevenson admitted advocate
He never practises, but keeps the title
1925
The great gift to the nation
Some 750,000 non-legal items transfer and the National Library of Scotland is founded
2010
Legal Services (Scotland) Act
Regulatory functions formally delegated to the Faculty
Jul 2020
Roddy Dunlop KC elected Dean
Succeeding Gordon Jackson KC

Did You Know?

The Faculty's own website will not say it was founded in 1532 — only that it “dates back to” that year.
For centuries the final step to becoming an advocate was a Latin oration on a text of Roman law, delivered while wearing a hat.
Robert Burns wrote a ballad about a Faculty election — “The Dean of Faculty”, on Henry Erskine's removal in January 1796.
Robert Louis Stevenson qualified as an advocate two days after passing his exams, never practised, and went on calling himself “advocate of the Scots Bar” anyway.
David Hume wrote much of his History of England while running the Faculty's library, surrounded by 30,000 volumes he did not own.
The Select Society — Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson — met inside the Advocates Library.
The Dean of Faculty outranks the Lord Advocate within the bar.
In 1925 the Faculty gave away roughly 750,000 items and created the National Library of Scotland in the process.
A cap of 50 advocates set in 1590 had already been overtaken; the Faculty has outgrown every ceiling ever placed on it.
The story that Scotland's supreme civil court was copied from the Parlement of Paris was popularised by one of the Faculty's own Deans — and is wrong.

Honest Caveats

The date the Faculty became a corporate body is genuinely unknown. Historians disagree, and the honest presentation is a range across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a single year.
“First recorded Dean, 1582 (John Sharp)” rests on limited sourcing — a standard dean list — and should be confirmed against F. J. Grant’s The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, 1532–1943 (Scottish Record Society, 1944) before being treated as settled.
Membership figures conflict across sources depending on what is counted and when. The 2024 Faculty figures used here are the most current and authoritative; the Law Society’s “over 14,000” solicitors is the Society’s own rounded self-description and will drift.
The Advocates Library’s founding date is muddled in some sources, which mix an early-1680s initiative with the 1689 inaugural oration. The Faculty’s own formulation is “dates from 1689”, and the National Library card governs the topic.
The historical admission dates (1610, 1619, 1750) come from a 1968 law-review history (Wilson) and should be read as scholarly-secondary rather than primary-archival.
The two David Humes are constantly conflated. The philosopher (1711–1776) was Keeper of the Library; his nephew (1757–1838) was the advocate and Professor of Scots Law.
The England comparison can be overcorrected too. The differences are institutional; the day-to-day work of a senior advocate and a senior barrister is recognisably the same job.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the Faculty of Advocates really founded in 1532?

Not in the sense that word usually carries. 1532 is the founding of the College of Justice — the court that became the Court of Session — under a papal bull of Clement VII and the College of Justice Act. Advocates and procurators admitted to plead before that new court are the Faculty's ancestors. But the Faculty as a corporate, self-conscious body cannot be documented from 1532. Its own official history says only that it “dates back to the foundation of the College of Justice in 1532, although individual Advocates were probably working in the courts even earlier” — a hedge, and a deliberate one. The first recorded Dean is dated 1582 and the Faculty's own minute books begin in 1661.

So what is the honest founding statement?

That the profession's roots lie in the advocates admitted to the College of Justice in 1532, and that the organised Faculty emerged gradually across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Finlay calls the 1532 procurators the “forerunners” of the later Faculty. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's group entry on the procurators of 1532 notes that “the precise significance of this event has been a matter of historical debate” and that scholarship has led to “a downgrading of the events of 1532”. N. T. Phillipson described the Faculty's identity as something that emerged as a professional corporation over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Why does this card carry a “traditional” claim status rather than “established”?

Because the loose element here is the founding date itself, not a superlative layered on top of a solid date. On most cards in this collection the facts of foundation are documented and it is a claim about being first or oldest that needs qualifying. Here the institution is beyond question real and its modern form is fully documented — but the single number attached to it, 1532, is a traditional attribution rather than a documented incorporation. That is a different kind of imprecision and the taxonomy should say so.

What is an advocate?

A specialist court pleader, the Scottish counterpart of an English barrister. Advocates are instructed by solicitors rather than directly by clients in most work — the referral bar model — are self-employed, are prohibited from forming partnerships, and hold rights of audience in every Scottish court including the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary, as well as the UK Supreme Court. They operate under the cab-rank principle: work within their competence should not be refused because the client or the cause is unpopular.

How is the Faculty different from the English Inns of Court?

England and Wales has four Inns — Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn — and a barrister is called to the Bar by their Inn, then usually works from independent chambers. Scotland has one Faculty. Every advocate belongs to it, is called by it, shares the Advocates Library with every other member, and is grouped for clerking and administration into a “stable” served by Faculty Services Limited. The Faculty's head is the elected Dean, compared by one scholar to the French bâtonnier, who takes precedence within the bar even over the Lord Advocate.

Are advocates just Scottish barristers, then?

Functionally the roles are close, and treating them as equivalent is fine for the narrow purpose of explaining who argues cases in the higher courts. As an account of the institutions it is an oversimplification. A single collective Faculty rather than four Inns, one shared library, the stable system, an elected Dean, and a wholly separate legal system with its own qualification route are real structural differences. An English law degree does not qualify a person for the Scottish bar.

How do you become an advocate today?

The usual route is an LLB in Scots law and the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice from one of the Scottish law schools, followed by matriculation as an “Intrant”, a period working in a solicitor's office, and a roughly nine-month unpaid pupillage known as “devilling” under a devilmaster, beginning each October with a foundation course. Intrants sit Faculty examinations and an aptitude test before being called and petitioning the Court of Session for admission to the public office of advocate. Senior advocates may later be appointed King's Counsel — “taking Silk”.

What did admission look like historically?

For much of the Faculty's history there was no set curriculum at all. In 1610 the Faculty petitioned that nobody be admitted without university study of philosophy plus two years of law, or seven years under an experienced advocate. By an Act of Sederunt of 12 February 1619 an examination and thesis in Civil — that is, Roman — law became the ordinary route, and an Act of Sederunt of 28 February 1750 added a necessary examination in Scots law. The traditional final ceremony required the candidate to deliver a Latin oration on a text of the Corpus Juris Civilis while wearing a hat. It was dispensed with in the early nineteenth century.

Was the Court of Session modelled on the Parlement of Paris?

No, and this is one of the durable myths of Scots legal history. The claim originates with Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh in his Institutions, was repeated by Erskine and later writers, and was pointedly ignored by Stair. R. K. Hannay, in “On the Antecedents of the College of Justice” (1922), argued that the court grew indigenously out of the Scottish curia regis and centuries of conciliar sessions, and that the 1532 foundation was “the inevitable end of a long development”. Hannay noted that “the popular account of the matter appears to rest upon a statement by Sir George Mackenzie”. French influence on Scots law generally is not in doubt; the specific institutional-copying story is.

How big is the Faculty?

Small, by the standards of the professions. Faculty figures for 2024, cited in the Scottish Government's Appointment of King's Counsel in Scotland 2025, give 555 practising members, of whom 151 — about 29 per cent — are women, including 135 practising King's Counsel, of whom 31 (23 per cent) are women. Older secondary sources quoting “just over 460” practising members, or a total of “730”, are counting different things or reporting earlier years and should not be used in place of the current numbers.

What is the Advocates Library and why does it matter beyond law?

It is the Faculty's collective library at Parliament House, which the Faculty dates from 1689, when Dean Sir George Mackenzie delivered its inaugural Latin oration on 15 March. It became one of the great collections of Enlightenment Europe. The philosopher David Hume was its Keeper from 1752 to 1757 and, as the National Library of Scotland records, while Keeper “he began to write his multi-volume best-seller ‘The history of England’”, working among some 30,000 volumes. The Select Society, founded in 1754 by the painter Allan Ramsay, met in the Library; its members included Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and Hugh Blair.

How is the Faculty related to the National Library of Scotland?

Directly and generously. In 1925, in the words of the Faculty's own history, “the Faculty gifted to the nation some 750,000 non-legal books, pamphlets, maps and sheet music, and the National Library of Scotland was established”. The Faculty kept its legal collections, which remain a working library for the bar. The National Library card on this site governs that story in detail.

What is the relationship with the Law Society of Scotland?

Scotland has a divided legal profession, as England does, but with its own bodies. Solicitors are represented and regulated by the Law Society of Scotland, established by statute in 1949, with its rules now in the Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1980; the Society describes itself as the professional body for over 14,000 Scottish solicitors. Advocates belong to the Faculty, which is far older and much smaller. Solicitors instruct advocates for higher-court work, and solicitor-advocates — a later development — may obtain extended rights of audience themselves.

Which advocates are worth knowing about?

Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, Dean 1682–89, founder of the Library and prosecutor of Covenanters, nicknamed “Bluidy Mackenzie”. Henry Erskine, Dean from 1785 until he was deposed in January 1796 for opposing the government's sedition and treason bills, and defender of Deacon Brodie. Francis Jeffrey, Dean from 1829 and co-founder of the Edinburgh Review, whose “This will never do” greeted Wordsworth's Excursion. The advocate David Hume, nephew of the philosopher, whose Commentaries of 1797 are still cited. Walter Scott, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson were all members.

Who regulates the Faculty?

It regulates itself, but not unsupervised. The Faculty's regulatory responsibilities are delegated under the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010, and it operates subject to the overriding supervision of the Lord President of the Court of Session. Its office-bearers — Dean, Vice-Dean, Treasurer, Clerk and Keeper of the Library, plus the chairman of Faculty Services Limited — are elected, and consult an elected Faculty Council.

Sources

Tier 1 · Primary and institutional

Faculty of Advocates, official history and “About the Faculty” pages.
College of Justice Act 1532; Acts of Sederunt of 12 February 1619 and 28 February 1750.
Scottish Government, Appointment of King’s Counsel in Scotland 2025 (2024 Faculty membership figures).
National Library of Scotland, David Hume and Advocates Library material.
Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010; Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1980 (legislation.gov.uk).
Law Society of Scotland, “About us”.
Batchelor v. Pattison & Mackersy (1876).

Tier 2 · Scholarly

John Finlay, Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (Tuckwell, 2000).
R. K. Hannay, “On the Antecedents of the College of Justice” (1922; Stair Society reprint, 1990).
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “procurators of the College of Justice (act. 1532)”.
W. C. Wilson, “The Scottish Bar”, Louisiana Law Review 28 (1968).
N. T. Phillipson, on the Faculty as an emerging professional corporation.
John W. Cairns, on Scots legal education and the Civil Law tradition.
F. J. Grant, The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, 1532–1943 (Scottish Record Society, 1944).

Tier 3 · General further reading

Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Faculty of Advocates”.
Stair Society publications on the history of Scots law.
Undiscovered Scotland biographies of Henry Erskine and Francis Jeffrey.