MACCORMICK'S SCOTLAND. Ed Neil Walker Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (www.euppublishing.co.uk), 2012. x + 250 pp. ISBN 9780748643806. £55.
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2013.0174 |
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
| Pages | 431-434 |
| Author | Scott Crichton Styles |
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
Professor Sir Neil MacCormick, FRSE, FBA (always in that order: with the Edinburgh society preceding the British Academy on his business card!), LLD, Jur.Dr.h. c. (multi!), QC, Regius Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at Edinburgh and MEP, was one of the greatest contemporary legal scholars in Scotland and furth its shores until his untimely death in 2009. Neil Walker and his colleagues put together this set of essays as a tribute to this great man. Although loaded with well-deserved titles and honours, the knighted professor and erstwhile MEP was the warmest of individuals, a warmth attested to by every contributor to this volume, and was simply known to all as “Neil”, and that is how,
As Drew Scott observes, Neil was possessed of “extraordinary intellectual versatility” (206) and in recognition of this the book consists of five sections each containing a pair of essays on variety of themes: “Scotland's MacCormick”, “Enlightened Scots”, “What's In a Legal System?”, “Sovereignty and Beyond”, “The Scottish Public Intellectual” and concludes with an “Epilogue”. Limitations of space militate against a review of all the contributions to this work, but all are stimulating and insightful. If I have any criticisms of this collection they are sins of omission not of commission. It is a great pity that space could not have been found to include the tribute to Neil by First Minister Alex Salmond, and it is a shame that there is no contribution from at least one of the many distinguished international overseas jurists with whom Neil collaborated with so closely, for example Robert Alexy, Jurgen Habermas or Robert Summers.
Hector MacQueen's essay is appositely called “A post-positivistic outlook from the thistle”, a playful allusion to Hugh MacDiarmid's great Lallans poem “A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle”. MacDiarmid's muckle poem is written in broad Scots, but is a meditation on themes of universal importance, and whilst no one could ever accuse Neil, that most genial of gentleman, of “Aye being whaur extremes meet”, he did in many ways embody the “Caledonian antisyzygy”: the Scottish nationalist who was internationalist, the legal positivist who was attracted to natural law, the legal theorist who loved black letter law and who was in Neil Walker's telling phrase the “cosmopolitan local”. Indeed, Neil's life...
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