Strange Gods in the Twenty-first Century: The Doctrine of aemulatio vicini

Smith's inaugural lecture as Professor of Civil Law at the University of Edinburgh in 1958 set out the manifesto for Smith's comparative law. The lecture took as its starting point the conceptual structure of the law of delict. Important opportunities had been missed in the failure to build delict on the sound foundations of the actio injuriarum and the lex Aquilia, and Scots law suffered from the misidentification of culpa with the English tort of ‘negligence’. These themes have been further developed and reappraised elsewhere. This chapter focuses upon a further topic also discussed on this platform by Smith: the principle of aemulatio vicini (or what is popularly but not very happily called ‘abuse of rights’).