“Ours is a Court of Papers”: Exploring Scotland and the British Atlantic World using the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project

This essay describes the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project (SCOS), a multi-institutional collaborative research initiative into Early America and the British Atlantic world. Developed by the digital scholarship team at the University of Virginia Law Library, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, SCOS explores everyday life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through Session Papers, the printed documents submitted to Scotland’s supreme civil court during litigation. The project provides scholars, genealogists, and the public with open-access digital copies of Session Papers held by the UVA Law Library, the Library of Congress, and other institutional partners. By digitizing these documents, contextualizing them with comprehensive metadata, and providing users with interpretative entry points, SCOS is designed to foster new research on this formative period of Scottish, British, and American history.