Criminal Law at Glasgow

Criminal law has been at the heart of legal scholarship in Glasgow throughout the history of the School of Law. William Forbes, appointed in 1714 as the first holder of the Regius Chair in Law, devoted half of his Institutes of the Law of Scotland (2 vols, 1722 and 1730) to the subject, while John Millar's lectures on criminal law formed a key part of his overhaul of the curriculum in the late eighteenth century, in which he made Glasgow Britain's leading law school, attracting students from all over the country. More recently, Gerald Gordon’s 1959 PhD thesis on Criminal Responsibility in Scots Law formed the foundation for his Criminal Law of Scotland (first published in 1968), a groundbreaking and internationally influential text which remains the leading modern work on the subject.

Today, research in the field of criminal law is carried out by a significant team of academics and research students. The work of the School's researchers has been supported by a variety of funders, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Clark Foundation for Legal Education, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Scottish Government. Their publications have appeared in leading journals such as the Criminal Law Review, Edinburgh Law Review, Modern Law Review and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and with leading publishers such as the University Presses of Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Oxford, Hart Publishing, and the Scottish Universities Law Institute.

The School also hosts the annual Gerald Gordon Seminar in Criminal Law, the UK’s only generalist criminal law conference. These pages provide more detail on these researchers, their work, and the Gordon Seminar.