When your reviewer started university in 1977 there were three substantial books that attempted to provide a general overview of the black-letter law of Scotland: TB Smith's A Short Commentary on the Law of Scotland, David Walker's Principles of Scottish Private Law and Gloag and Henderson's Introduction to the Law of Scotland. Walker's style was so dry as to remove any possible pleasure from reading his Principles; Smith's was so individualistic as to make his Short Commentary incapable of editing. Neither of these books has survived as a usable tool for today's undergraduate students or practitioners. Only Gloag and Henderson, first published in 1927 and by 1977 on its seventh edition, was remotely capable of being edited, updated and reworked by others: so it alone has been accorded an afterlife denied its (then) rivals. Probably its collaborative origins go far to explain why this is so. Smith was as much identified with Edinburgh Law School as Walker was with Glasgow School of Law. Gloag was the lineal predecessor of the latter and Henderson the lineal predecessor of the former: yet their book exhibits no rivalry between the two. It is no criticism to say that their individual styles, their personalities even, were subsumed into the text, as opposed to crying out from every paragraph.
There was a full twelve years between the seventh and eighth editions of Gloag and Henderson, but that seemed to matter far less then than it would today. Educating students with textbooks over a decade out of date is no longer a luxury in which any modern legal system can indulge. Only five years separate the thirteenth and the latest, fourteenth, editions but, even so, such is the speed of development in our modern legal system that any publication today is, to some extent at least, out of date almost as soon as it appears on the bookshelf. The General editors of this new edition of Gloag and Henderson explain in their preface their decision not to address any potential consequences of Brexit. They had no other option for, even when the fifteenth edition comes to be published, the true scale of the devastation wrought by that process is unlikely to be fully apparent. Nevertheless, the fourteenth edition, published in the summer of 2017, was able to include the reforms, great and small, in the Succession (Scotland) Act 2016 and the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016. Its latest statutory reference is to the Damages (Personal Injury) (Scotland) Order (SSI 2017/96), which was made at the end of March 2017, and there is mention of the...
