Angus McAllister, SCOTTISH LAW OF LEASES Haywards Heath: Bloomsbury Professional, 4th edn, 2013. lxxiv + 622 pp. ISBN 9781847665669. £68.
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Author | Malcolm Combe |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2014.0219 |
| Pages | 301-303 |
The law of leases is not tricky to conceptualise. The relationship, where a tenant is entitled to the use of another's heritable property for a certain length of time in exchange for a periodical payment, is neatly summarised in the opening paragraphs of McAllister's updated book, but that simplicity belies the modern complexity that increasingly underpins this and other areas of Scots private law. New legislation and the continuing impact of human rights and related devolution concerns make the fourth edition of the Scottish Law of Leases a rather meaty tome, a fact quickly confirmed by the lazy reviewer's trick of checking the relative lengths of tables of statutes and cases and overall page count through the previous editions.
Whilst the tome may be meaty, there is not much fat present. Certain cuts of text are unavoidably lean: to fully capture the multifarious leasing regimes that prevail in rural Scotland would quickly dominate such a general treatise, whilst the law for residential and commercial tenancies can be similarly tricky to digest. Perhaps tellingly, one of the first things the reader meets is a bibliography which references eight “Specialist texts on landlord and tenant”. If that approach (which has been retained from the previous edition) can be classified as a concession to the limitations of the text, it should not be taken as attributing any kind of weakness to the author. Rather, it is a pragmatic acknowledgment of other sources. Indeed, pragmatism is perhaps the main strength of McAllister's approach, which aims to produce a readily understandable guide to the law of landlord and tenant for readers of all abilities.
With a slight structural re-organisation from the previous edition, the book is split into five (rather than four) parts: “Introduction”; “General Landlord and Tenant Law”; “Commercial Leases”; “Agricultural Leases”; and “Residential Leases”. (The decision to replace the previous parts 3 and 4, on “Lease Provisions” and “Leases Regulated by Statute”, seems a sensible one.) The first part, which is only one chapter long, takes in fundamental concepts of leasing whilst introducing relevant common law rules and developing human rights jurisprudence. As McAllister explains, the ECHR can have implications in all sorts of expected and unexpected circumstances, including where a public authority seeks to recover or order the recovery of possession, or perhaps even where the “right to life” is engaged (with reference to the...
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