Kapil Summan

The Scottish government had no intention to reverse cuts to the legal aid budget made in 2011, contrary to claims made by the Edinburgh Bar Association (EBA) that these savings were meant to be temporary, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf stated as he announced an impending consultation with the profes

Inflationary increases in civil court fees have been condemned by lawyers as being “inimical to access to justice” as they impose a “substantial burden” on litigants with average incomes and are based on the principle of full cost recovery, which has been discredited by the

The Scottish government's plans to introduce a presumption against prison sentences of 12 months or less would, in practice, apply to sentences of anywhere up to 18 months where a guilty plea is tendered early enough and would limit access to justice as declining summary business shrinks the pool of

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken SLN assistant editor Kapil Summan reflects on the presumption of innocence in one of the best legal books of modern times.

It walks like a tablet, but talks like a laptop — the super slick Surface Pro is Microsoft’s answer to the latest iPad, and probably the one after that too.

Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf's comment that a decline in convictions for people aged under 21 was a "great credit to our justice system" has been described as "mildly extraordinary" by one QC, given that crime itself is rising. Latest figures have shown that those aged under 21 who have been convi

The repeated use of the word ‘victim’ by Scottish prosecutors to refer to both victims of crime and alleged victims has no basis in law, according to legal experts. This week, the head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC signed a memor

Scottish Legal News has learned that vulnerable adults are being put at a disadvantage because of severe delays in lodging guardianship orders in court due to a shortage of mental health officers. A guardianship order is sought where a person has no capacity and may be very vulnerable

The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner by John Keay In The Tartan Turban John Keay seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of 19th century adventurer Alexander Gardner, a Scots-American who committed feats of travel far ahead of his time, traversing as he did “remotest Kafiristan&rdquo

Less than a month after a warning by Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, that the English legal system was facing a ‘ticking time bomb’ in its failure to recruit judges, Scottish Legal News can reveal that Scotland too is facing such a crisis with top qu

The UK’s most senior judge has revealed the tensions in the build-up to the Brexit appeal at the Supreme Court earlier this year. In the Miller case last November, three judges in the High Court held that parliamentary authority was needed to trigger Article 50 an

The Ruler's Guide by Chinghua Tang In 626CE Li Shimin murdered his brothers and forced his father to abdicate the throne of China’s nascent Tang dynasty, ushering in the country’s golden age and becoming Emperor Tang Taizong, the greatest of China’s Sons of Heaven.

Kapil Summan was greatly impressed by East West Street and spoke to the author about current threats to human rights. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, scientist Jared Diamond cites 20 genocides since 1950, arguing that “genocide has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for

Trials: On Death Row in Pakistan by Isabel Buchanan

The gavel, a device never used in the English courts, features on the cover of Confessions of a Barrister – and is a harbinger of things to come.