UCT to confer honorary degree on Professor Kenneth Reid

Legal scholar and former law commissioner, Chair of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Kenneth Reid is one of seven highly esteemed figures to be awarded an honorary degree at UCT's June or December graduation ceremonies this year.

Professor Kenneth Reid, a pre-eminent jurist, has played a pivotal role over the past two decades in the promotion of private law scholarship at a local, regional and global level. He is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, and holds the Chair in Scots Law at the latter. As an internationally renowned scholar of property law and comparative law, his work has had a profound impact on law and legal scholarship.

Reid's most outstanding accomplishment has been the abolition of the feudal system in Scotland (2004). He was a commissioner of the Scottish Law Commission and for a decade directed the drafting of the statutes necessary to replace the feudal system.

Reid is also a leading scholar of mixed legal systems and this aspect of his scholarship has involved a number of South Africans. His collaboration with South African scholars (many at UCT) since 1994 has led to a number of productive joint academic projects, including the volume on Mixed Legal Systems in Comparative Perspective: Property and Obligations in Scotland and South Africa (Oxford, 2004).

Read more about the seven honorary degrees to be awarded in 2015.

Photo courtesy of British Academy for the humanities and social sciences.