"While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland"
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A compliment with teeth: Combe starts by granting that some legal practitioners can thread the needle between professional duty and personal decency, then swivels to the real target - a strain of lawyerly identity so total it crowds out ordinary ethics. The line is engineered as a moral sorting hat. “Natural morality” implies a baseline conscience that should travel with you into any courtroom; “individual character as gentlemen” invokes a social code of honor that, in Combe’s world, is supposed to restrain cleverness. Then comes the dagger: “others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland.” It’s not patriotism. It’s indictment.
The joke is in the absolutism. By stacking “human or divine” against a narrow jurisdictional code, Combe makes the local statute book sound like a rival religion - a parochial creed elevated above universal principles. The subtext is a fear that legalism becomes a technology for evasion: if the only binding rule is what can be argued from Scottish law, anything not explicitly prohibited becomes fair game, and anything unjust becomes defensible if it’s procedurally valid.
Combe, an educator and a leading voice in early 19th-century moral reform circles, is writing in a period when professional classes were consolidating power and prestige. His anxiety isn’t merely about bad actors; it’s about a profession training people to prize technical victory over moral accountability. The phrase “law of Scotland” doubles as cultural critique: a warning about what happens when institutional loyalty hardens into ethics-free expertise.
The joke is in the absolutism. By stacking “human or divine” against a narrow jurisdictional code, Combe makes the local statute book sound like a rival religion - a parochial creed elevated above universal principles. The subtext is a fear that legalism becomes a technology for evasion: if the only binding rule is what can be argued from Scottish law, anything not explicitly prohibited becomes fair game, and anything unjust becomes defensible if it’s procedurally valid.
Combe, an educator and a leading voice in early 19th-century moral reform circles, is writing in a period when professional classes were consolidating power and prestige. His anxiety isn’t merely about bad actors; it’s about a profession training people to prize technical victory over moral accountability. The phrase “law of Scotland” doubles as cultural critique: a warning about what happens when institutional loyalty hardens into ethics-free expertise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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