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Margaret L Ross and James P Chalmers, WALKER AND WALKER: THE LAW OF EVIDENCE IN SCOTLAND Haywards Heath: Tottel Publishing (www.tottelpublishing.com), 3rd edn, 2009. ci + 616 pp. ISBN 9781845921651. £120.

Document Cited authorities 8 Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0321
Pages540-541
AuthorFiona Leverick
Date01 September 2010
Published date01 September 2010

Walker and Walker's The Law of Evidence in Scotland was first published in 1964, at a time when the discipline was crying out for a text covering the civil and criminal law of evidence, given that the most recent work of any substance (the third edition of Dickson's A Treatise on the Law of Evidence in Scotland) was published in 1887. A much needed second edition of Walker and Walker followed in 2000, written by Margaret Ross with the assistance of James Chalmers. This third edition, published in 2009, sees James Chalmers elevated to the status of co-author alongside Margaret Ross.

The structure of the third edition remains identical to that of the second and the only alteration in terms of coverage is that some material that is no longer relevant, such as proof by restricted mode, has been dropped. Retaining the familiar layout – the chapter headings remain the same – is almost certainly a positive point. Practitioners will be familiar with these and there is no sense in interfering with what has always been a well-structured work.

The changes made in the third edition are thus in the nature of general updating to reflect developments in the law that have taken place between the publication of the second edition and September 2008, the cut off date for legal developments. There have been only two major statutory developments in this period: the Sexual Offences (Procedure and Evidence) (Scotland) Act 2002 and the Vulnerable Witnesses (Scotland) Act 2004, both of which amend the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995. The former amended the law in relation to sexual history evidence. The latter made substantial changes to the definition of a vulnerable witness and the various protections available to such persons when giving evidence and thus this chapter is the only chapter which has changed substantially in content between the second and third editions. There have also been several important decisions in case law, such as Cinci v HM Advocate 2004 JC 103 on the corroboration of sexual offences and res gestae; McCutcheon v HM Advocate 2002 SLT 27 on mixed statements; and HM Advocate v Higgins 2006 SLT 946 on the admissibility of confessions obtained through deception, all of which are dealt with in the text. For the most part, though, wholesale changes to the law have been few and far between in the eight years since the second edition, but this is not to underestimate the amount of updating that has taken place: the third edition references over 300 new...

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