As the last of the “institutional” works, George Joseph Bell’s Principles of the Law of Scotland is today seen as marking the end of the “institutional” period in Scottish legal development. Remarkably, however, the Principles was originally conceived, not as an authoritative work which would bring its author enduring fame, but as a student text - indeed as one part only of a whole system of legal education. This paper examines the circumstances in which the Principles was written and considers its gradual transformation into a work of a quite different kind
