Editorial

Prior to his apology to the Scottish Parliament yesterday the Lord Advocate gave welcome confirmation that the Duff and Phelps administrators' Clark and Whitehouse have indeed been paid £21 million in compensation and awarded £3m towards their legal costs as was widely rumoured and repor

David Whitehouse has given a searing account of his ordeal at the hands of Scottish prosecutors and police who subjected him and his colleague Paul Clark to what the authorities now admit was a malicious prosecution. It is a mortifying description of what citizens of rogue states around the world wo

‘Old Corruption’ was the term given in Georgian times to the system of patronage and preference which saw government sinecures, pensions and contracts handed out to cronies and relations. Thank goodness it could not happen today. As we show below, Henry Dundas, who looks down upon Edinbu

In the 1970s Ernst Schumacher, an unlikely named British Coal economist, wrote his famous work Small is Beautiful bequeathing the decade a title that became a mantra, but which arguably made little impact on society. Today, in a reaction to globalisation boosted by Covid lockdowns, a new slogan has

In a rare moment of candour, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis yesterday admitted that the British government was breaking international law by overriding the terms of the EU Withdrawal Agreement that dealt with the Northern Ireland protocol. Scottish Legal News will not be offering a prize t

Even by the standards of today’s enfeebled and anaemic media, the lack of coverage of the death of Clive Ponting who passed away last week at his home in Kelso is remarkable. It is also lamentable. Ponting was a young, high-flying civil servant who could not live with the lie Margaret Thatcher

Viscount Melville, The Times reports, is considering applying for a judicial review of the legend on a proposed plaque on the Melville monument to reflect his ancestor's alleged perpetuation of the slave trade. Indeed, his lordship sprang to the defence of his forebear on the BBC's Today programme t

It is no surprise that one of the prime aims of China’s new national security law aimed at suppressing Hong Kong’s democracy movement published yesterday is the abolition of trial by jury. The elimination of the right to trial by one’s peers is always one of the first targets of au

All too often our coverage of fatal accident inquiries in Scotland is centred upon their non-occurrence rather than the lessons to be learned from them. A freedom of information request made last year revealed that there were 127 outstanding FAIs at the time of the inquiry. There has yet to be one i

Today's unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court has provided welcome reassurance to those who feared for the very future of our parliamentary representative democracy. It is, of course, an historic victory for Joanna Cherry QC and her legal team of Aidan O'Neill QC, David Welsh, Elaine Motion and