Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Private Law

Digital Assets as Transactional Power

Digital Assets as Transactional Power

Published 20th January 2022
By David Fox, Professor of Common Law, University of Edinburgh

If the law is to recognise digital assets as property for private law purposes, then it would benefit from analysing them as composite things.  The asset is more than mere data.  It is a set of transactional functionalities.  The most important of these is the capacity of the person who holds the private key to effect new transactions which will be recognised as valid by the technical rules of the system.  Analysed in this way, the asset can be viewed as a specific transactional power over unique data entries on the ledger.

Continue readingDigital Assets as Transactional Power
Comments closed
Delictual Liens

Delictual Liens

Published 30th September 2020
By Andrew Steven, Professor of Property Law, University of Edinburgh

In Scotland, the law of rights in security develops slowly. There are reasons for this. First, there is limited legislative time for reform of private law. Second, it is an area which has been relatively neglected in terms of doctrinal study. Third, we are a small jurisdiction and case law is limited.

Nevertheless, there are some grounds for optimism. The Scottish Government’s legislative programme for 2020/21 published on 1 September contains a commitment to “work towards implementation of the Scottish Law Commission proposals on reforming the law relating to Moveable Transactions, with a view to introducing a Bill early in the new Parliament” and accepts that this would “make it easier for businesses and individuals to raise finance, thereby assisting economic recovery”. The last month has also seen the successful defence by Andrew Sweeney of his University of Edinburgh doctoral thesis on the landlord’s hypothec. In addition, an earlier Edinburgh thesis on floating charges by Dr Alisdair MacPherson, now Lecturer in Law at the University of Aberdeen, has been published in book form.#

Continue readingDelictual Liens
Comments closed
Tokenisation of Assets in Scots Private LawDigital assets

Tokenisation of Assets in Scots Private Law

Published 17th August 2020

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

It is a commonplace to say that technological development runs ahead of the law.  Financiers and IT developers have created new kinds of tradeable value and entirely virtual systems for trading them.  Any thought about their status in law comes only later, often prompted by an insolvency or by the failure of one of the parties to perform as expected.

The question that then arises is what, if any, law applied to those assets and systems.  Very likely, the parties gave no deliberate thought to the question.

Continue readingTokenisation of Assets in Scots Private Law
Comments closed
Climate Change and Scottish Property LawDry soil

Climate Change and Scottish Property Law

Published 5th August 2020
By Andrew Steven, Professor of Property Law, University of Edinburgh

In the pre-pandemic days of last autumn, the Scottish Government placed addressing climate change at the heart of its Programme for Scotland 2019-2020. The First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, in her introduction to that publication, stated: “The consequences of global climate change will be severe. While in some parts of the world its effects are existential, we will also feel the impact here at home. We must act.” The Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019 is an example of the Scottish Government so acting.

Continue readingClimate Change and Scottish Property Law
Comments closed

Common problems: BAM TCP Atlantic Square Limited v BT plc

Published 7th July 2020

BAM TCP Atlantic Square Limited v BT plc [2020] CSOH 57 presents something approaching a full house of recent hot topics in conveyancing: interpretation of a deed of conditions; determination of the scope of common property; the transitional provisions in the Land Registration etc (Scotland) Act 2012; positive prescription and the offside goals rule. Lady Wolffe is therefore to be congratulated for managing to get through everything in a mere 95 paragraphs. The focus of this blog, however, is the interaction between inaccuracy as understood under the 1979 and 2012 Act, and the offside goals rule.

Continue readingCommon problems: BAM TCP Atlantic Square Limited v BT plc
Comments closed
css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel