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Edinburgh Private Law Blog Posts

The Scottish Model: The Envy of the English in Nineteenth-century Tax Administration

The Scottish Model: The Envy of the English in Nineteenth-century Tax Administration

Published 19th February 2026

by Chantal Stebbings,[1] Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal History, University of Exeter

In the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain, income tax was poised to dominate direct taxation in terms of revenue and potential for fiscal growth. The machinery of its administration was based entirely on that developed for the assessed taxes in the eighteenth century. The assessed taxes, which constituted the principal form of direct taxation prior to income tax, aimed at taxing the wealth of individuals through the outward signs of their establishment. The first was the window tax, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had been joined by several more, including taxes in respect of servants, carriages, horses and dogs.[2]

The assessed taxes and the income tax were administered under a localist system, whereby they were assessed and collected by independent, local, lay commissioners and their own appointed local officers. From the mid-nineteenth century the system in England was found to be incapable of keeping up with the increasing scope and sophistication of income tax, and the English revenue boards looked with envy to Scotland which had, by that time, developed a system for the administration of the assessed taxes which was markedly different, and significantly more efficient, to theirs and which they believed they could adopt for income tax. The Scottish system was essentially a modified version of the orthodox pure localist system in that it involved a greater degree of central government participation. The way in which Scotland altered the traditional system forms the subject of this piece.

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Romantic Partner Torts: Contemporary Problems and the Legal History of Taking Heartbreak Seriously

Romantic Partner Torts: Contemporary Problems and the Legal History of Taking Heartbreak Seriously

Published 17th December 2025

by Dr Jinal Dadiya, Lecturer in Law, Goldsmiths University of London

Introduction

There has been a recent rise in former romantic partners instituting tortious actions against one another for events which took place within the course of their romantic relationships. This is the case both in the UK,[1] and in other common law jurisdictions.[2] In the last year, English courts have seen at least two influential personalities being sued by their romantic partners in tort.[3] Currently, the law of obligations tries to resolve such disputes by applying general standards of private law, without however recognising special duties or exceptions on account of the parties’ romantic involvement. This reticence has been rationalised through appeals to discretion, emotional complexity, the public-private divide, and the perceived moral volatility of intimacy.[4] As courts and legislatures confront coercive control, emotional manipulation, and technologically mediated abuse, an important jurisprudential reconsideration is underway: what constitutes a civil wrong in the context of romantic relationships, and how might tort law be recalibrated to attend to it? In this blog entry, I argue that normative answers may be found in legal histories of heartbreak.

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Money as Thing and Money as Functions

Money as Thing and Money as Functions

Published 17th November 2025

by David Fox, Professor of Common Law, University of Edinburgh

  1. Introduction

Lawyers are wary of providing universal definitions even of their most fundamental concepts. Money is a prime example. There is no authoritative definition of money that allows us to identify with certainty all those things that serve as money in the law and those that do not.  If lawyers have any view of the range of things they treat as money, then it is one informed by its commonly-stated economic functions.[1]  Economists often take the view that “money is what money does”.[2]  Thus the textbook economic definitions generally say that money is a medium of exchange and a unit of account. From these follow other secondary functions, such as to serve as a store of value and a standard of deferred payment.[3]

The purpose of this blog entry is to suggest that the economists’ functional approach to understanding money is also the right one for lawyers to take. Money in the law is an aggregation of legally recognised functions. It is a kind of composite entity.  Its most important functions are to serve as the notional bearer of a certain number of units of monetary value and to discharge debts.  While those functions are attributed by law to certain things (such as coins, banknotes or liquid bank balances), these things are subsumed by the larger legal functions attributed to them.  The functions become more important than the thing itself.

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Attributing Wrongdoing Without Persons? Competition Law and the Challenge to Delict Theory: Part II

Attributing Wrongdoing Without Persons? Competition Law and the Challenge to Delict Theory: Part II

Published 24th October 2025

by Grigoris Bacharis, Lecturer in Private Law, Edinburgh Law School

I. Introduction

In my previous post, I explored the emergence of enforcement or regulatory delicts and, in particular, how the doctrine of the undertaking transitioned from public enforcement to competition damages claims. I argued that this development represents a striking departure from private law’s commitment to the concept of legal personality. By attributing liability not to a legal person but to an “economic unit,” the doctrine unsettles, among other things, the principle that responsibility must track wrongdoing and personhood.

As a tentative explanation for why this extension only applies in competition law, I proposed that the law tolerates such a radical departure from the principle of legal personality because there are certain delicts, such as competition damages, that have a hybrid character, part private, part public.

But should the law of delict and tort accommodate this shift? I argue that while the undertaking doctrine might be defensible on enforcement grounds, its coherence with private law’s normative architecture is deeply contested.

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Attributing Wrongdoing Without Persons? Competition Law and the Challenge to Delict Theory: Part I

Attributing Wrongdoing Without Persons? Competition Law and the Challenge to Delict Theory: Part I

Published 7th September 2025

by Grigoris Bacharis, Lecturer in Private Law, Edinburgh Law School

I. Introduction

I begin with a broad claim that I cannot fully defend here,[1] but wish to illustrate in part: significant areas of European delict (or tort) law are undergoing a subtle but meaningful transformation. Across domains such as environmental harm, data protection, and competition enforcement, delictual claims are increasingly mobilised to serve regulatory aims. As scholars like Kysar have noted, claimants are no longer simply seeking redress for private wrongs.[2] They are enforcing public norms through private litigation.

This shift gives rise to what might be called enforcement or regulatory delicts: private actions that retain the formal structure of delict law but pursue objectives—deterrence, compliance, and systemic accountability—that are quintessentially public. The trend is inspired mainly by American legal practice, where private enforcement, via torts, federal claims, mass litigation, and settlements, is widespread and arguably expanding.[3]

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