Professor Andrew Simpson

Biography

Andrew Simpson is Professor in Scots Private Law at the University of Aberdeen. He is a graduate of the Universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge. Following completion of his doctoral studies, Professor Simpson taught at Aberdeen University for ten years prior to becoming Professor in Scottish Legal History at the University of Edinburgh. Subsequently, he returned to the University of Aberdeen to take up a Chair in Scots Private Law. He has also been a visiting lecturer in comparative law at the Faculty of Law in the University of Bergen and at the University of Agder. In 2022, he was a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, hosted by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, participating in the project 'Social Governance through Legislation' (Social Governance Through Legislation | CAS (cas-nor.no)). 

Professor Simpson specialises in legal history, comparative law and private law. As a legal historian, Professor Simpson is particularly interested in medieval and early modern Scots law. He has a particular interest in the medieval traditions of law that informed the work of the College of Justice in the sixteenth century, and in the ways in which lawyers conceptualised the authority of those traditions. He is also interested in the relationship between the institution of the College of Justice and Scottish state formation in this period.

In terms of comparative law, Professor Simpson has participated in teaching and research in relation to models of legal cultural comparison, and he is an Associate Member of the Research Group for Legal Culture at Bergen Law Faculty. He is interested in the ways in which studies into comparative law can inform the development of Private Law in particular. He is particularly keen to explore systems sometimes seen as peripheral or marginal to the ‘great’ traditions of the world, for the light they may shed on commonly-held assumptions about how law ought to be handled.