Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield
Scottish advocate and judge
Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield (4 May 1722 – 30 May 1799) was a Scottish advocate and judge.
Life
McQueen was born at Braxfield House near Lanark on 4 May 1722, son of John McQueen.
He studied law at Edinburgh University and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1744. In 1759 he was appointed an Advocate Depute appearing for the Crown in prosecutions. He often appeared in more than 15 cases per day and earned £1900 in a single year.
He became a judge in 1776 and took the title Lord Braxfield.
In 1788 he became Lord Justice Clerk, the second most senior judge in Scotland. Explicitly taking the view that "Government in this country is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented" he took an active role in the suppression of the Friends of the People Society in the trials and sentences passed on Thomas Muir and others. To accomplish this he "invented a crime of unconscious sedition". A famous quote of his in this respect was "Let them bring me prisoners, and I will find them law."
In 1795 he oversaw the trial and imprisonment of Sir Archibald Gordon Kinloch of Gilmerton for the murder of his half-brother Sir Francis Kinloch.
“Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield” enters the record as scottish advocate and judge. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Robert, McQueen and Lord can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7347588. VIAF identifies the subject as 60517466. The Library of Congress control number is n85146036. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1722, 1799, 1744 and 1759.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.