RIGHTS OF PERSONALITY IN SCOTS LAW: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. Ed by Niall R Whitty and Reinhard Zimmermann Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2009. lxvi + 614 pp. ISBN 9781845860271. £50.
| Pages | 541-543 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2010.0322 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Author | Gillian Black |
For those who attended the Rights of Personality conference at the University of Strathclyde in May 2006, this edited collection of the conference papers has been eagerly awaited.
While personality rights are a familiar legal concept to civilian lawyers, they have no obvious home in Common Law jurisdictions and, despite its mixed heritage, Scots law is generally perceived as falling within the latter camp with respect to such rights. Chapter 1 therefore provides an essential introduction to the issues surrounding personality rights in Scots law, including a definition: “[i]t is commonly said that rights of personality protect the non-patrimonial or dignitary aspects of the human person – who a person is rather than what a person has” (3). Chapter 1 also sets out the aim of the collection, to consider how best to develop personality rights in Scots law. This is most urgently required in the case of the right to privacy, where the gap in Scots law is now revealed by the need to meet our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights as implemented by the Human Rights Act 1998. While English law has rapidly built up a body of case law on privacy in the decade since the Human Rights Act entered into force, Scots law has seen considerably less civil litigation. With the dearth of litigation comes the opportunity to take a more considered and principled approach to protecting human rights. Can personality rights fill the gap?
In answering this question a grasp of the historical basis is essential, and Professor Blackie provides an exhaustive account of “personality rights” in his chapter (at 116 pages it should perhaps more accurately be called a thesis). His research offers an account of the historical development of personality rights in Scots law and provides a wealth of scholarly detail, including previously unreferenced material from the Argyll Justiciary records. Blackie reviews personality rights from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and rather helpfully equates earlier doctrines to the modern terminology. Thus, his references to ravishment and
Professor Whitty's own chapter (which is 100 pages long: together with Professor...
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