Founded in October 2008, the HathiTrust is able to draw on the material in the 12 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and 11 libraries of the Universities of California. The partnership includes 60 other research libraries across the United States, Canada, and Europe. The repository is administered by the University of Michigan.

Regular readers of Scottish Legal News may, in the current lockdown conditions, be looking for something to read other than the small print of the operating instructions for the Hoover, Dyson or any other similar domestic appliance. It may be that in the vast array of volumes in HathiTrust there is something that may be of interest and use in practice.

As a starter, it may be of interest to revisit the case of John Baird and Andrew Hardie whose part in the Radical Wars of 1820 remains in our memory, or should do. The 200th anniversary of the 1820 insurrection is celebrated this year. The legal interest in the case, and several others that were associated with it, is the entirely legitimate application of the English law and procedure of treason. The whole trial was noted verbatim by a shorthand writer: “Trials for high treason, in Scotland, under a Special Commission, held at Stirling, Glasgow, Dumbarton, Paisley, and Ayr, in the year 1820 […] Taken in short-hand by C.J. Green”. The three volumes are freely available here.

Lord Cockburn’s Trials for Sedition can also be viewed along with contemporaneous accounts of various trials.

The Glasgow Cotton Spinners’ Strike of 1837 led to the leaders being tried for conspiracy to murder and can be read about in a digital copy of The Trial of Thomas Hunter, Peter Hacket, Richard M’Neil, James Gibb, and William M’Lean, the Glasgow cotton-spinners, before the High Court of Justiciary, at Edinburgh, on charges of murder, hiring to commit assassinations - and commiting, and hiring to commit, violence to persons and property. / Reported by James Marshall. To which is annexed statistics connected with the spinning trade, & c., of Glasgow, by Peter M’Kenzie

Of real interest also is the case of Burke and Hare, renowned, and local, suppliers of corpses to the medical staff at the university. Only Burke had charges of murder proved against him, the Crown having the useful evidence of Hare. An anonymous contemporary publication entitled “The Westport Murders” recorded the evidence and it was published in 1829 by Thomas Ireland in Edinburgh. The book is freely available here.

Scots lawyers with interests in other areas of law may find within the repository other material that remains of relevance to modern law, or at the very least is of general interest.

Other discoveries of old publications of interest to readers of the Scottish Legal News are invited.