Decline in Inner House business threatens development of Scots law

Lord Doherty, delivering the Lord Rodger Memorial Lecture in Glasgow last month, drew attention to the declining volume of Scottish appeals reaching the Supreme Court. Nine judgments were issued in Scottish appeals in each of 2013 and 2014. That figure fell to four in 2023, none at all in 2024, and four again in 2025. As of the date of his lecture, only one Scottish appeal was listed for hearing before the court, and Lord Doherty said he was unaware of any other pending case in which permission to appeal had been granted.

Part of the explanation, he suggested, lies in the introduction in 2015 of a permission requirement for Supreme Court appeals. But the more fundamental cause, he argued, is the dwindling volume of cases in the Inner House itself. In 2020 the Inner House issued 74 civil judgments. By 2025 that figure had fallen to 32. The first four months of 2026 produced 21, which Lord Doherty described as an encouraging indicator of potential recovery.

Kenneth Reid, emeritus professor of Scots law at the University of Edinburgh, has published a two-part analysis of the phenomenon on the Edinburgh Private Law Blog. He traces the primary cause to the Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, which raised the financial threshold for Court of Session actions to £100,000, transferring a substantial volume of lower-value litigation to the Sheriff Court, and which created the Sheriff Appeal Court as the principal appellate forum for Sheriff Court decisions.

Before the 2014 Act, appeals from the Sheriff Court accounted for around a third of Inner House business. That pipeline has now almost completely closed. In 2025, the Sheriff Appeal Court issued 45 numbered civil judgments – but the Inner House issued just two arising from Sheriff Court appeals. 

Two provisions of the 2014 Act were designed to preserve a route to the Inner House for significant Sheriff Court cases – section 112, which allows the Sheriff Appeal Court to decline to hear an appeal and instead remit the case to the Inner House, and section 113, which permits a second appeal with leave – but Professor Reid finds that both have been interpreted narrowly and have delivered very little in practice. Only 10 cases have reached the Inner House via section 112 since the Act came into force. Section 113 appeals have rarely exceeded one a year in recent years.

Professor Reid also notes that decisions of the Sheriff Appeal Court bind only itself and the Sheriff Court, and carry no binding authority over the Court of Session or tribunals.

Noting that landmark cases including Donoghue v Stevenson and Burnett’s Trustee v Grainger began life in the Sheriff Court before reaching the highest appellate level, Professor Reid argues that the 2014 Act provisions are now ripe for review. Cases are the “life blood of the common law”, he writes, quoting Lord Rodger in Moncrieff v Jamieson. “More legally significant cases are needed in the Inner House and beyond, not fewer,” he adds.

In his lecture, Lord Doherty concluded: “If the Court of Session and the Supreme Court do not have sufficient opportunities to decide important points of law the development of Scots law is liable to suffer.”