James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount Stair

Scottish advocate and judge who served two separate terms as Lord President of the Court of Session (1671 to 1681, and again from 1690), the head of the Scottish civil judiciary. He resigned the first term in 1681 rather than swear the Test oath asserting royal supremacy over the Church, and spent the following years in exile in the Netherlands, returning with William of Orange in 1688. In the year of his first resignation he published the Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1681), which became the foundation of modern Scots law and, together with the later works of Bankton, Erskine and Bell, established the institutional writer as a formally recognized source of Scots law in its own right, a status common law jurisdictions do not generally grant to academic legal writing. He was raised to the peerage as Viscount Stair in 1690.