STAIR, JAMES DALRYMPLE, 'St, VISCOUNT (1619 1695), Scottish lawyer and statesman, was born in May 1619, at Drummurchie in Ayrshire. After seven years as regent of the University of Glasgow he resigned, going to Edinburgh, where he was admitted to the bar on Feb. 17, 1648. In 1649 he was ap pointed secretary to the unsuccessful commission sent to The Hague to treat with Charles II. by the parliament of Scotland, and was sent in the following year to Breda, where the failure of Montrose's expedition forced Charles to change his attitude and to return to Scotland as the covenanted king. Stair met him on his landing in Aberdeenshire. He refused in 1654 to take the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth. Three years later (1657), Stair was appointed a commissioner of justice in Scotland, on the recommendation of Monk. After the Restoration he was received with favour by Charles, knighted, and made a judge in the court of session. He refused to take the declaration that the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant were unlawful oaths, and, forestalling deposition, he resigned. The king, how ever, summoned him to London, and allowed him to take the declaration under an implied reservation. In 1669 a family calam ity, the exact facts of which will probably never be ascertained, overtook him. His daughter Janet, who had been betrothed to Lord Rutherford, was married to Dunbar of Baldoon, and some tragic incident occurred on the wedding night, from the effects of which she never recovered'.
In 1670 Stair served as one of the Scottish commissioners who went to London to treat of the Union. In Jan. 1671 he was ap pointed president of the court of session. In 1672, and again in 1673, he was returned to parliament for Wigtownshire. When the Test Act was enforced Stair, dreading a fate similar to that of Argyle (q.v.), went to London to seek a personal interview with the king; but the duke of York intercepted his access to the royal ear, and when he returned to Scotland he found a new commission of judges issued, from which his name was omitted.
He retired to his wife's estate in Galloway, and occupied himself with preparing for the press his great work, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland, which he published in the autumn of 1681, with a dedication to the king. He repaired to Holland in Oct. 1684, and took up his residence, along with his wife and some of his younger children, at Leiden, where he published the Decisions of the Court of Session between 1666 and 1671 and a small treatise entitled Physiologia nova experimentalis.
In his absence a prosecution for treason was raised against him and others of the exiles by Sir G. Mackenzie, the lord advo cate, but it was dropped, owing to the appointment of his son, the master of Stair, who had made his peace with James II., as lord advocate in place of Mackenzie. Stair returned from Hol land in the suite of William of Orange. In 1689 he was again placed at the head of the court of session. He was attacked by an anonymous pamphleteer, perhaps Montgomery or Ferguson the Plotter, in a pamphlet entitled The Late Proceedings of the Parliament of Scotland Stated and Vindicated. He defended himself by publishing an Apology.
Shortly after its issue he was created Viscount Stair (1690). The massacre of the Macdonalds of Glencoe (Feb. 1,3, 1692), for which his son, the master of Stair, was largely responsible, nat urally reflected on him. On Nov. 29, 1695 Stair died in Edinburgh. Stair's great legal work, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland deduced from its Originals, and collated with the Civil, Canon and Feudal Laws and with the Customs of Neighbouring Nations is import ant for the historical study of Scottish law. See J. Murray Graham, Annals of the Viscount and First and Second Earls of Stair (1875) ; A. J. G. Mackay, Memoir of Sir James Dalrymple, First Viscount Stair (1875) ; and Sir R. Douglas, Peerage of Scotland, new ed., by Sir J. B. Paul.