Scottish Rule Research Articles

Donation and Conquest: The Formation of Lothian and the Origins of the Anglo-Scottish Border

Various ‘donation’ accounts of the twelfth century attempted to explain Scottish rule of ‘Lothian’ as the outcome of grants from English rulers to Scottish kings. Until relatively recently historians of both Scotland and England tended to accept these accounts. However, ‘Lothian’ was a politically sensitive topic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the value of these accounts for an earlier period is low. There is a variety of evidence of better value, and although the guidance of strictly contemporary sources is very poor prior to the later eleventh century, continuous Scottish rule south of the Forth cannot be traced prior to the reign of Máel Coluim III (r. 1058–1093), and in the case of some areas David his son (r. 1113/24–1153). It is suggested that the emergence of ‘Lothian’ as a jurisdiction is a response to the political changes of that era, an important development in its own right but also a critical intermediate development for the emergence of the familiar Anglo-Scottish border.

“Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge”: Medicine and Sovereignty in Macbeth

“This essay surveys Shakespeare’s Macbeth in terms of medical discourses. Macbeth was produced at a time when the English people were obsessed with the identity of the commonwealth due to the accession of an alien King, James I. At this historical juncture of Tudor-Stuart dynastic change, the nation was increasingly conceived through a corporeal metaphor. People imagined the political community was vulnerable to pathogenic infiltration, and this essay situates Macbeth as a contribution to the Jacobean political debate dealing with immunity politics. Critics have argued that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s affirmative response to the royal claim of the ‘union of two kingdoms, Scotland and England.’ The medical discourses of this play, however, disable this sort of reductive interpretation as the semantic features of Scotland in the play are ambiguous. In Macbeth, Scotland is the source of James’s sovereign legitimacy, but it is simultaneously portrayed as a morbid land and a source of plague and illness. It is healed, in the play, by English royal legitimacy, not by Scottish rule, to which James’s authority returns. Malcolm’s power ‘unknown to woman’ and Macduff’s birth that ultimately destroys the female matrix as he “untimely ripped his mother’s womb” are none other than ten thousand soldiers borrowed from the English King. Macbeth is a peculiar nationalist play which conflates the discourses of medicine with Englishness, not the newly claimed British sovereignty.”

Unilateral Promises: Scots Law Compared with the PECL and the DCFR

Abstract: This contribution compares the recognition of a general concept of unilateral promises, binding without acceptance by the promisee, in Article 2:107 of the Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) and Article II.-1:103 of the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR) with the equivalent Scottish rule. The significance of this comparison is that the rule in question is significantly wider than that found in most other European legal systems, which tend to recognize only limited categories of unilateral promises or to impose a requirement of acceptance. Despite an authoritative restatement of the law by Lord President Gill in Regus (Maxim) Ltd v. Bank of Scotland plc [2013] CSIH 12, the Scottish courts have generally approached the concept in a restricted and restrictive way, although at least occasionally allowing it a role even in commercial cases. The decision of the UK Supreme Court in the Scottish appeal Royal Bank of Scotland v. Carlyle [2015] UKSC 13 poses a significant challenge to such caution, and the judges’ self-imposed restrictions are also inconsistent with the DCFR’s approach. On the other hand, the Scottish experience suggests that the DCFR’s requirement that notice of the promissory statement must reach the promisee to make it effective except when the statement is a public declaration may, in turn, be too demanding. It is also suggested, in opposition to a suggestion by Professor Martin Hogg, that from both the DCFR and the Scottish experience the conduct of the recipient after the statement is made may be relevant to the question of whether the statement can be treated as a binding promise.

The Roman and Civilian origins of the conditio si testator sine liberis decesserit in Scots Law

This article examines and evaluates the Roman and Civilian origins of the Scottish rule of succession known as the conditio si testator sine liberis decesserit. The article focuses on the rule that is implied by law where the will itself is silent but, as the legally implied rule probably seeks to emulate the express provision of a testator, the article starts by setting out the position as regards express testamentary provision. The original Roman source of the rule is identified; thereafter the article examines and comments upon the lengthy period of development of the Scottish rule up to its final form at the start of the twentieth century. That latter point in time is when the Scottish rule had received much of its modern form. This article therefore forms a basis for the understanding of modern Scots law.

Playing the indigenous card? The Shetland and Orkney Udal Law group and indigenous rights

The term ‘indigenous peoples’ generally refers to the original inhabitants of areas of the world colonized by Europeans. Relatively few ethnic minorities in Europe have been recognized as indigenous. A consequence of globalization is that knowledge of rights gained by indigenous groups in different parts of the world has led to explicit or implicit claims for indigenous status by organized groups within some European ethnic or regional minorities. An example from the Northern Isles of Scotland is the Shetland and Orkney Udal Law group (SOUL), which includes on its website links to legal decisions supporting indigenous rights in Canada and Australia. SOUL argues for greater local autonomy regarding the use of resources. The islands were inhabited by Norse settlers from Scandinavia from the 9th century AD and came under Scottish rule in the 1460s. Certain elements of Norse law related to land tenure, in particular foreshore rights, have survived to the present as a form of customary law referred to as udal law. Udal law has been the subject of court cases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been presented as symbolizing Orkney and Shetland identity, and brought into public debates on matters of concern to Orcadians and Shetlanders. Udal law is invoked to support a claim for local control over the surrounding sea and seabed, important for fishing, salmon-farming and oil exploitation. These issues are examined in relation to definitions of indigenous peoples applied by the United Nations, International Labour Organisation, and World Bank.

Antonin Esmonin de Dampierre, magistrat et franc-maçon dijonnais (1744-1824)

Patrick Guyon : Antoine Esmonin de Dampierre, a Dijon magistrate and Freemason (1744-1824). The study of Dampierre, a Dijon «noble de robe », takes us into a very different 18th Century from that of the Encyclopaedists. He had no time for his contemporaries' perpetual doubt and vague deism. In the tradition of quietism, he sought a personal contact with God. After being introduced to Freemasonry by a friend, he took an active part in the establishment of the Rectified Scottish Rule in Burgundy, becoming a fervent follower of Willermoz, whom he later joined in Lyons as the Dijon Masons were lukewarm about the new rite. He later dabbled in magnetism and somnanbulism. After the Revolution had taken away his goods and titles, he became a pillar of the Ultra party during the Restoration. Finally the birth of Romanticism found him teaching Madame de Staël in the Coppet circle.

The White Man's Rule 1

TO the great majority of people in this country the name Sierra Leone is nothing more than the vague geographical expression of a colony situated somewhere in Tropical Africa, once more familiarly known as the “white man apos;s grave,” and long regarded as the last resort of the hopelessly incompetent or the incurably vicious. That such a term of reproach is no longer applicable is shown in “A Transformed Colony,” by Mr. Alldridge, whose personal knowledge dates so far back as 1871. In a clear and attractive manner the author gives a description of the marvellous changes which have taken place as a result of the white man's of the Scottish rule. Situated amidst beautiful scenery, some little distance up the Rokell river, Freetown, the first settlement, now the capital and port of the colony, was originallv the dumping ground for the liberated slaves drawn from all parts of West Africa; and from this collection of motley races has grown up a curious mongrel population, bound by no family or tribal ties, speaking no language of its own, and connected onlv by the common bond of aquaint English patois, and a paternal system of English government. To this has of recent years, been added the Hinterland, peopled by numerous aboriginal tribes, each speaking its own language, preserving its own customs, and living under a more or less well-defined feudal svstem. As a result of the former conditions the Freetown creole has developed, a semi-civilised beinf with a superficial veneer of civilisation, an overwhelming mass of self-conceit, and a ludicrous capacity for imitating the less desirable qualities of the European. Never is he more happy than when, clothed in silk hat and frock coat, he struts proudly to church, the observed of all observers.On the other hand, we find the aborigine, still the untutored savage, clothed in his loin cloth and little else, carrying out his ancestral pursuits of agriculture and war, but withal more likeable and trustworthy.