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: Scots law

The Second Edition of Personal Bar: Questions on Writing Legal Treatises in the 21st Century

The Second Edition of Personal Bar: Questions on Writing Legal Treatises in the 21st Century

Published 11th March 2026

by Elspeth Reid, Emeritus Professor of Scottish Private Law

The publication of the second edition of Personal Bar has come nearly twenty years after the first, which these days is a long time in the world of academic writing. The transformed environment for the second edition has given me cause to reflect on the enterprise of writing a Scottish Universities Law Institute (SULI) text, or any “big” legal treatise for that matter. How has treatise writing altered, or how should it be modified, in response to the huge changes we have seen in the 21st century? I cannot pretend that I have answers to the questions raised here, but the following suggest themselves as concerns that might now usefully be considered in the wider legal community.

T B Smith’s vision for the SULI series when it was established in 1960 was much influenced by the Louisiana State Law Institute, as a model of what a smaller jurisdiction could do for itself. Scotland, like Louisiana, was a smallish jurisdiction which valued its distinctive identity, where publishing was expensive and challenging, and there were few publishing outlets available for texts specifically about that jurisdiction. The Louisiana State Law Institute was dedicated to “public service”, and that seemed to be part of Smith’s vision too. The Louisiana State Law Institute had broader ambitions of law reform, which in Scotland were hived off elsewhere, but its key mission, which SULI was to share, was carrying out “scholarly research and scientific legal work”, producing treatises which were directed at supporting the profession as much as the academic community. In 1961 Smith predicted that “Within ten years we may hope to see the main divisions of Scots law restated in up to twenty comprehensive treatises.”[1] SULI did not quite reach that ambitious target, but it has done a wonderful job with an impressive list of titles over the last 65 years, and also in energising academic writing in Scotland more generally, all the while observing T B Smith’s motto for the series, more majorum, usu hodierno – according to the custom of our ancestors, according to today’s practice. But “today’s practice” has changed hugely since the 1960s. To what extent does this mean that SULI texts or similar legal treatises should change too?

Continue readingThe Second Edition of Personal Bar: Questions on Writing Legal Treatises in the 21st Century
Leave a Comment
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.

Continue readingThe Scottish Model: The Envy of the English in Nineteenth-century Tax Administration
Leave a Comment
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.

Continue readingRomantic Partner Torts: Contemporary Problems and the Legal History of Taking Heartbreak Seriously
Leave a Comment
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.

Continue readingMoney as Thing and Money as Functions
Leave a Comment
New insights through defamiliarization

New insights through defamiliarization

Published 20th August 2025

By Anna Bleichenbacher, PhD student, University of Basel[1]

I. Prologue

Compare how it felt to speak your first words in a foreign language with how it feels now after years of practice. Once we can do things as a matter of habit, they start to become automatic for us. Deliberately framing something in a different perspective – what the Russian literary theorist Shklovsky said about the role of art in his concept of ‘defamiliarization’ (‘ostranenie’)[2] – challenges that automatic response. Defamiliarization is also possible in legal research. It enables us to take a new look at our own jurisdiction and how we work within it.[3] Studying and researching only in our home jurisdiction makes everything we do there feel natural to us – even inevitable. All that changes once we see it from the outside.

Breaking through this habituation and seeing familiar things with new eyes can be facilitated by a research stay abroad. In 2024 the author of this blog entry undertook a six-month research stay at the University of Edinburgh. This entry deals with the differences in the research and teaching between Edinburgh and Basel, as well as the new perspectives the author gained from her time abroad. She experienced an ‘ostranenie’ that challenged her automatic assumptions of how the law had to be.

Continue readingNew insights through defamiliarization
Leave a Comment
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