The period after reform was one of great intellectual vitality in law in Edinburgh. In 1862 two crucial professorial appointments were made: James Muirhead to the Chair of Civil Law and James Lorimer to the revived Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations. Muirhead had studied in law and arts in Edinburgh and law in Heidelberg; Lorimer's studies have already been alluded to. These two men managed for the first time in the nineteenth century to give legal study in Edinburgh a greater international presence through their contacts overseas, and as authors participating in the emerging European world of legal scholarship.

Muirhead established modern Roman law teaching in Edinburgh, drawing on the best contemporary, essentially German, scholarship, with which he kept up-to-date all his life, and on which he himself wrote, notably his edition of The Institutes of Gaius and Rules of Ulpian (1880) and Historical Introduction to the Law of Rome (1886). His obituary noted that “[A]s Professor of Civil Law … his reputation is more European than English”, and his lectures were described like this:

In Edinburgh you saw seated before a mere sprinkling of students a broad-shouldered, buirdly form, surmounted by a refined, clean-shaven face, indicating high intellectual capacity. And enthusiasm kindled there, not over a barren logomachy, but when the gradual development of some important institute was being traced through long eras of Roman history.

He died in 1889, but his style of scholarship was maintained by his successors in the Civil Law Chair. The first was Henry Goudy, educated at Edinburgh (M.A. LL.B.) and Königsberg; best known now as author of a still important treatise on the Scottish law of bankruptcy, Goudy was called to the Regius Chair of Civil Law in Oxford in 1894. His successor was James Mackintosh, author of a student text on the Roman Law of Sale (1892) and Roman Law in Modern Practice (1934).

Lorimer became a renowned author in legal theory and international law, essentially founding these as modern disciplines in Scotland. He was said to be “an interesting but not a wholly successful lecturer”:

Under the dingy bust of Socrates, the Professor, his spare figure closely bent over the manuscript, discoursed on lofty themes in a voice, weak indeed and tremulous, yet capable of expressing equally a rare humour or a genuine pathos … Few professors have ever exercised a greater personal magnetism over the students … [H]e was a great moral teacher, moulding their characters and transfiguring their whole view of life. He was their master; they were his disciples.

Lorimer's successor was Sir Ludovic Grant, who held the chair from 1890 to 1922.  His career was more that of university administrator than scholar: he was Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1894-1910.

 In 1862, Cosmo Innes, the famous record scholar and an editor of the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, occupied the history chair: teaching of English and Continental Constitutional History was a necessary component of the new LL.B degree. Innes's successor in 1874 was Aeneas J.G. Mackay; also a noted author whose works included a life of Stair and a treatise on Court of Session practice. Mackay's successor in 1881 was John Kirkpatrick, educated in Edinburgh and Heidelberg, where he had graduated doctor of law; one of the other contenders for the chair in 1881 was Robert Louis Stevenson.  (Stevenson's mother reassured him: “I am on the whole relieved that you have not got the chair as I am sure it would have worried you.”) In 1909, Kirkpatrick was succeeded by John Hepburn Millar, who had for some time served as Lecturer in International Private Law, one of the growing number of lecturers who supplemented the teaching of the professors as the Law School and curriculum expanded.

The occupants of the Chair of Scots Law in the second half of the nineteenth century were largely undistinguished men.  When Robert Louis Stevenson was a student in the Law Faculty in the early 1870s, the holder of the Chair was Norman Macpherson, editor of the series of Session Cases which bears his name.  In November 1872 Stevenson wrote to a friend as follows about the experience:

I am now, working hard (credite posteri).  I am at Political Economy, which I love; and Scots Law, which is a burthen greater than I can bear.  The large white head of the professor relieved, in the pale gaslight, against the black board, is the one 'taedii dulce lenimen' that we poor students have.  He is called 'The Bum-Faced', by those who know him.[1]

However, Macpherson was succeeded in the Scots Law Chair in 1888 by its most distinguished holder since Bell, John Rankine. Rankine, who was Professor until 1922, was educated in Edinburgh and Heidelberg. A successful and popular teacher, Rankine was the noted author of the still authoritative Law of Landownership in Scotland (1879), which went through several editions, and the Law of Leases (1887). On his death the Royal Society of Edinburgh noted that “In the course of the thirty-four years during which he held the Chair, most lawyers now in practice in the south-east of Scotland, and many others, passed through his hands; and few, if any, do not look back upon his lectures as their first illumination of the great fabric of Scots law.”

From 1866 to 1892 the chair of Conveyancing was held by James Stuart Fraser Tytler of Woodhouselee. His successor, John Philp Wood, held the chair until 1900; author of a number of works, his lectures were published in 1903. John Mounsey next held the chair until 1922

 John Adam Lillie, Tradition and Environment in a time of change (1970).

John Lillie, later Sheriff of Fife and author of a student text on mercantile law, was a student in the Edinburgh Law Faculty just before the First World War, and has left us these comments about his teachers in his memoirs.

The professorial staff included some very distinctive personalities.  Professor John Rankine, of the chair of Scots Law, was a very learned precisian, an expositor of and commentator on especially the law of landownership and of leases.  He was a son of the manse from Ayrshire and knew country life.  His lectures were very comprehensive and detailed in treatment and, it was said, varied little from year to year, even the jokes and wiseacre interjections ('We've all got the seeds of dissolution in us') being the same and, there being no suitable textbook – Erskine's Principles, 'little Erskine', which he prescribed was unenlightening to a student – a number of very full notes of his lectures were in circulation.  In appearance he was short, slightly bow-legged with aquiline features, and a long moustache and trimly pointed beard.  He was exact in speech and had an unpretentious dignity and courteous manners.

Sir Ludovic Grant held the chair of Jurisprudence and Public International Law.  He was the son of a Principal of the university.  He was very tall, rubicund, moustached and of an aristocratic personality.  He was easy on notetakers, repeating each sentence as he went along and all in a very loud and explosive tone of voice.  The names and concepts of his subject were accordingly highly flavoured and memorable.  'Pumperdink', 'Bynkerschoeck', the 'mare clausum' and such reverberate still in one's ears.  We heard with pleasure from him that the first essay in English on the law of warfare at sea was the work of a Scotsman, the notable John Clerk of Eldin.  And of course the standing of his predecessor, Professor Lorimer, among international jurists was a matter for pride.

Most dramatic of all lecturers, as befitted his subject, was Professor Harvey Littlejohn, of the chair of Forensic Medicine, son of a very famous predecessor, Professor Sir Henry Littlejohn.  Harvey was dramatist, in mind and manner.  He used no notes.  He strode up and down behind his desk as he lectured, and pointed his very real eloquence with gestures and facial expressions.  Visits to the police mortuary were a somewhat gruesome addition to the lectures – the sailor who had been six weeks in the Forth, still fully dressed but without flesh on hands and face, the suicide who had swallowed chloroform in an Edinburgh cemetery, the contents of whose stomach we were invited to smell, and other such, were upsetting experiences to many in the class.

Professor Hepburn Miller of the chair of Constitutional Law and History was, like most others of that time, a very vigorous personality.  There was never any question of audibility in these days and Professor Miller was pronouncedly authoritative, and some said controversial, in his exposition.  But he knew his Scottish history and literature, and he was himself one of the outstanding Scottish literati of his day.  The pages of Blackwood's 'Maga' testify to this.

The law of Scotland has many roots in and affinities with the law of the Romans, the 'Civil Law'.   This affinity it shares with many of the systems of the continent of Europe and their offshoots in the colonial field.  The Civil Law has a rounded finish given it in its years of mature development in the great Codes, the Institutes, especially those of Gaius and Justinian.  It has been further illuminated in the writings of the continental jurists of the Low Countries and Germany and France.  It was in these schools that its principles were learned and absorbed in the founding centuries of the law of Scotland.  So it was essential for the young Scottish jurist to be steeped in this history and tradition as a proper prelude to the study of the law of Scotland and a necessary shield against the impact of the alien code of England – alien alike historically and in its foundations, in its guiding intellectual concepts and its procedural framework – in a word in its attachment to custom, convention and precedent, and the vagueness of its reliance on philosophical principle.  The study of the Civil Law was accordingly a basic concern of the law schools of Scotland, properly prefaced by a – perhaps too brief – survey of its history.  Here in the class of Civil Law, of Professor James Mackintosh, KC, was raised a curtain upon the stage of humanity scarcely to be equalled in breadth and range.  The great chapters of the law were laid out before us in the setting of the world and empire of one of the three great contributory streams of out civilisation and culture, the Roman – the others the Hebrew and the Greek.  Side by side with it we were introduced in the class of Jurisprudence to the philosophical concepts which have been thought proper to regulate the effort after Justice.  Such was the preparation for the study of the law of Scotland as it is, and of the more special fields of regulation by law – International Law, Constitutional Law, Forensic Medicine, Conveyancing and Evidence and Procedure.

These studies were most beneficially made against a background of daily practice in the law in its business aspect.  In the rapidly expanding business of Baillie & Gifford, Writers to the Signet, I was plunged into a wide variety of sides of the practitioners' business, an experience which militated against academic laurels but greatly enhanced the understanding of the abstract in law.  In particular I obtained an early grounding in the fascinating techniques of the feudal law which much illumined the lectures of that fine expositor, Professor Mounsey, of the chair of Conveyancing.

As well as the individual distinction of Lorimer, Muirhead and Rankine, this period saw a broadening of the curriculum to include other subjects with the development of the appointment lecturers in some specialist subjects. The important developments derived from the Universities Act of 1889. Moreover, the curriculum saw significant reform, both to take account of developments in the University and changes in the requirements of the legal profession. Progressively, graduation in law started to become the norm, with the M.A. LL.B. combination being particularly popular, although the undergraduate degree of B.L. had also been instituted. The aspirations of the Faculty were high and international, to be more than just a teacher of local lawyers.

At the very end of the period, one significant development took place: women were for the first time admitted to study law. In 1909, Eveline MacLaren M.A. and Josephine Gordon Stuart M.A. graduated LL.B. The two women had been warned they might face hostility from the other law students, but in fact they were met with cheering when they first entered the lecture hall. Josephine Stuart was placed first in Administrative Law, second in Civil Law, second in Scots Law, and ninth in Conveyancing. For a long time there was merely a trickle of women law students and graduates; but Miss Stewart had led the way in dramatic style. It was not until after the Great War, however, that women were admitted to the legal profession.

Professors of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations

1862    James Lorimer
1890    Sir Ludovic James Grant, Bt.

Professors of Civil Law

1862    James Muirhead
1889    Henry Goudy
1893    James Mackintosh

Professors of Constitutional History 1909 (formerly Universal History)

1874    Aeneas J.G. Mackay
1881    John Kirkpatrick
1909    John Hepburn Millar

Professors of Scots Law

1864    George Moir
1865    Norman Macpherson
1888    Sir John Rankine

Professors of Conveyancing

1866    James Stuart Fraser Tytler
1892    John Philp Wood
1900    John Little Mounsey

Professors of Forensic Medicine

1862    Sir Douglas MacLagan
1897    Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn
1906    Harvey Littlejohn