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Lawyers acting for Sir Van Morrison have launched a legal challenge against the blanket ban on live music in licensed premises in Northern Ireland. Belfast-based John J Rice & Co Solicitors is acting for the famous musician in a judicial review which argues the ban, which dates back to the begin

Benjamin Bestgen considers the fairness of the high standards to which we hold lawyers. Read last week's jurisprudential primer here. The legal profession is a deeply human one and humans are complex creatures. As a species we are capable of extraordinary feats of courage, intellect, wisdom, kindnes

A teenager who was rapped for supporting Black Lives Matter protests turned the tables on her mother by turning her in for allegedly trying to storm the Capitol. Helena Duke, 18, took to Twitter to highlight footage of her mum, uncle and aunt among the mob of pro-Trump rioters who wreaked havoc earl

Andrew Stevenson reflects on a literary-cum-legal encounter between two of Scotland's greatest writers.  Two hundred years ago two of Scotland’s most eminent men of literature met in court. One of them, James Hogg, the self-styled Ettrick Shepherd, is best known for his novel The Private

The Civil Division of the Sheriff Appeal Court has allowed an appeal by a mother against the grant of a supervised contact order for her young daughter’s father and remitted the case to a new sheriff for reconsideration. The appellant, AG, who was the defender in the original ap

The administrators of Rangers FC who were maliciously prosecuted have been paid more than £20 million, The National reports. The newspaper claims that £21m in total has been paid to the two men and a further £3m has been given to them for legal expenses.

Scotland has officially recorded only one high-profile fraud case for the entire period of 2020 as Covid-19 continues to pose profound logistical challenges for the country’s justice system.  The latest data from KPMG’s Fraud Barometer report reveals a single case of alleged fraud,

Reports of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse rose by 84 per cent between 2015 and 2019, the BBC reports. Victims of such abuse face "enormous stigma and shame", according to police and charities.

Baktosch Gillan spoke to Rosalind McInnes, BBC Scotland legal director, about her career with the broadcaster and coping with lockdown. In more than two decades as an in-house solicitor with BBC Scotland, Rosalind McInnes has been a source of advice and support to not only the journalists employed a

Martyn Evans has been appointed chair of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) board. He will begin the role on February 1, replacing David Crichton who has been serving as interim chair since December 2019.

A new award will honour the memory of a University of Aberdeen law student who killed herself after she was assaulted by her boyfriend. Law student Emily Drouet, 18, died in 2016 after she suffered abuse at the hands of Angus Milligan, who choked and slapped her.

A new academic paper arguing that the devolved nations should have greater access to the courts in order to settle conflicts between the different orders of government, has been published. It is among a number of new legal research papers from Edinburgh Law School that are now available.

A number of former police officers are campaigning for the legalisation of drugs in order to stem Scotland's high number of drug deaths, The Times reports. The officers, among them a retired chief inspector, argue that radical reform is needed to punish those who profit from the drug trade and to ad

Concerns for the prison population have been raised by the Scottish Human Rights Commission. Writing to the Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, the SHRC sought assurances that measures will be taken to deal with the rising prison population.

An alleged doughnut thief has been arrested for impersonating a police officer. A shopkeeper in Utah called police after a man wearing a "sheriff's deputy" jacket stole a doughnut and fled in a pickup truck.