Henry Home, Lord Kames

Henry Home, Lord Kames, was a Scottish judge, philosopher and writer who lived from 1696 to 27 December 1782 and became a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Called to the Scottish bar in 1724, he was appointed a Senator of the College of Justice by George II in 1752 and sat on the bench until his death. As a judge he took part in the 1778 case of Knight v Wedderburn, which held that slavery had no legal basis in Scotland. His writings, including the Historical Law Tracts, set out a four stage model of social evolution that later became a standard way of organizing the history of Western civilization, and his work helped shape the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology as well as the teaching of English as an academic subject in Scottish universities.