Lord Kames

Historical Law-Tracts is one of the earliest contributions to the Scottish Enlightenment project of a historical science of society. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), was an influential Scottish juEAe, a prolific man of letters, and one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in Scotland, and his goal in this work is to show the study of law as a genuinely scientific inquiry and not a mere collection of facts for the lawyer to memorize. He deployed a large range of ancient, medieval, and...

Elements of Criticism is Kames’s most influential work. When it first appeared, in 1762, it was the most comprehensive philosophical work on “criticism” in English, and it was published in five editions during Kames’s lifetime and another forty editions over the next century. In America, Elements of Criticism served as a standard text for college students of English.Liberty Fund’s edition of Elements of Criticism is the first modern edition of one of Kames’s most influential works. In Elements,...

Henry Home, Lord Kames, was the complete “Enlightenment man,” concerned with the full spectrum of human knowleEAe and its social use. However, as a lawyer and, after 1752, as a juEAe on the Court of Session in Edinburgh, he made many of his most distinctive contributions through his works on the nature of law and legal development.Principles of Equity, first published in 1760, is considered his most lasting contribution to jurisprudence and is still cited. In his jurisprudence, Kames...