RIP Ian Macneil: a lawyer, law professor, landlord, and mensch.

From the Times of London, the obituary of Ian Macneil, a lawyer, law professor, and landlord who embodied the ideal that ownership may be more about proprietorship than about sucking every last dollar (or pound) out of your property:

Ian Macneil, 46th chief of the Clan Macneil and 26th Macneil of Barra, was a much-respected American-born contract lawyer who gave his tenants and neighbours on the Outer Hebridean island of Barra security of tenure on the most favourable contract terms imaginable.

As one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of contract law Macneil was particularly associated with the invention, development and exposition of “relational contract theory”, which posits that all contracts belong in the context of complex webs of exchange relations.

As laird of Barra, though, he was so popular a landlord that when he first offered the islanders part of his island estate for a nominal sum in 1981 they declined, saying they were quite happy and saw no need for change.

In 2003 he did transfer his 9,000 acres in the southern half of Barra into public ownership on condition that the islanders could choose, at any time, to take over the land themselves without cost. Macneil, who was at that time 74, said he was giving up the property because running a crofting estate was a time-consuming business and he was “beginning to slow down”.

He expressed confidence that the Scottish Executive’s Rural Affairs Department would run the property in the crofters’ best interests, but ensured that if the islanders, many of them Gaelic-speaking, ever chose to take over the islands they would be given both Barra and its neighbour, Vatersay, without charge. The islands were, in effect, put in trust for their inhabitants. . . .

One other incident stands out from his professional career: in 1988, while on a visiting professorship at Harvard, Macneil taught the young Barack Obama, and was so impressed that he told his wife he thought he might have America’s first black President in his class. Macneil was invited to President Obama’s inauguration in Washingtonlast year but was unable to attend because of failing health.

From his father’s death in 1970 Macneil was much involved in Barra, running the estate, arguing for the interests of the island’s fishermen and crofters, and protecting the island’s air service from proposed cuts. His father had restored the ruined family seat, Kisimul Castle in Barra, but in 2000 Macneil, who had a home in Edinburgh and occupied a croft on Barra, donated the castle, which is now run by Historic Scotland, to the nation for a peppercorn rent of a bottle of malt whisky and £1 a year. It was a typically practical gesture by a notably kind and learned man