694 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
Lord McLaren. By Professor C. G. Knott. 
(Read December 4, 1911.) 
John McLaren, Q.C., LL.D. (Edin., Glas., Aber.), Lord of Session from 1881, 
was born in Edinburgh on April 17, 1831. He was the eldest son of 
Duncan M‘Laren, one of the most prominent figures in political and 
municipal life of Edinburgh in his day and generation. He was a delicate 
boy, and his life was in serious danger through a severe illness which 
followed a bad wetting he experienced when about the age of twelve. 
For years he lived much abroad, visiting such places as Madeira, Jamaica, 
and Algeria. He had a great thirst for useful information and possessed 
a retentive memory, so that his broken school life did not impede his career 
when he passed into college and began to study for the Law. 
In 1856 he was admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates, and, 
chiefly by his literary work, soon established a reputation as an able and 
erudite lawyer. His treatises on Trusts and Wills appeared respectively 
in 1863 and 1868 ; and the third edition of the combined work in 1894 is 
regarded as the leading authority on these subjects north of the Tweed. 
The seventh edition of Bell’s Commentaries was edited by him in 1870, and 
holds a very high place in the estimate of the legal profession. It is a 
recognised piece of legal etiquette that the opinions or verdicts of a living 
judge cannot be quoted in court as being of any authority ; and when an 
advocate had to refer to Lord M‘Laren’s writings on Trusts and Wills, as 
was not unusual before Lord M‘Laren himself, it had to be done in a 
mysterious way, without explicit mention of the author, but yet so as to 
leave no doubt as to the “ authority ” who was being appealed to. 
Lord M‘Laren was married on December 14, 1868, to a daughter of 
H. L. Schwabe, of Glasgow. In 1869 he was appointed Sheriff of Chancery, 
resigning the appointment in 1880 when he entered public political life. 
In politics Lord M‘Laren was a Liberal, and came to the front in 1880, 
at the time of Gladstone’s famous Midlothian campaign. He was elected 
Member of Parliament for the Wigtown Burghs, and on the formation of 
Gladstone’s Government became Lord Advocate for Scotland. At the 
succeeding by-election, necessitated by his accepting a Crown appointment, 
he lost his seat, and it was not till January of 1881 that he regained his 
place in Parliament as one of the members for Edinburgh. In August of 
the same year, however, he retired from parliamentary life, and accepted 
the judgeship on the Scottish Bench, which he adorned to the end of his 
