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THE CONSISTORIAL DECISIONS OF THE COMMISSARIES OF EDINBURGH, 1564 TO 1576/7. Ed Thomas M Green Edinburgh: The Stair Society (www.stairsociety.org), 2014. lxxvi + 484 pp. ISBN 978187251 7285. £45.

Document Cited in Related
AuthorJ D Ford
DOI10.3366/elr.2015.0284
Published date01 May 2015
Date01 May 2015
Pages287-289

Philosophers are not alone in being troubled by what H L A Hart famously called “the pathology and embryology of legal systems” (The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961) 122). Taking their lead from Hart himself – who paid particular attention both to the Russian Revolution and to more recent events in the British Commonwealth – public lawyers have used similar vocabulary in analysing contemporary changes in constitutional arrangements. One study, for example, considered the attempted secession of Quebec from Canada in 1995, and asked what the legal position would be if a Scottish government were to issue a unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom (M D Walters, “Nationalism and the Pathology of Legal Systems: Considering the Quebec Secession Reference and Its Lessons for the United Kingdom” (1999) 62 MLR 371). If denied legitimacy by the existing legal system as well as by international law, but if eventually effective in creating a new independent state, would the declaration lead to the end of the Scottish legal system as it currently exists and to the creation of a new one? If so, when exactly would one system give way to the other? How would the new system come into existence? Would there be a period in which Scotland had no legal system? These are obviously questions of interest to historians as well.

The last example of UDI in Scotland...

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