Opinion

The recent changes to the Highway Code have been widely reported. However, the initial worries of chaos on UK roads, gridlock as city traffic is paralysed by cyclists hogging the roads, or pedestrians making a dive in front of traffic in crash for cash bids have all gone unfounded. Quite frankly, no

The imposition of additional trade and financial sanctions by the UK, US and EU against Russia will have major implications for businesses and merits preparatory contingency planning, writes Stacy Keen. The UK government this week introduced sanctions which can target businesses believed to be

And so the time has come to talk of David and Henry, and the crimes of which they stand accused. In David Hume’s case sentence has already been passed, his name now severed from the largest post-war building on Edinburgh University’s principal campus. Given that he had fixed ideas on bea

With the UK government protections to prevent a flood of corporate insolvencies all now tailing off, will 2022 see the much talked about "tsunami" of insolvencies? Market views on that are mixed but it does seem certain that there will be at least a significant upturn in insolvencies compared to 202

When Scotland’s most senior judge and his colleagues oppose the suggested reforms to the legal profession and when he is joined in opposition by both the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and the President of the Law Society of Scotland, on behalf of their respective bodies, some might be conce

Editor's note: All animals are cancellable, but some are more cancellable than others. That is the inference to be drawn from the manner in which we pick and choose history's villains. David Hume is out but Marie Stopes, eugenicist and admirer of Adolf Hitler, is apparently in. Edinburgh Council has

The recent high profile case of Tylicki v Gibbons in the English High Court reiterates that professional sportspersons can successfully sue their fellow competitors for negligence, writes Ahmed Khogali. The core issue of the legal dispute concerned a “duty of care” in sport. The case exa

The Scottish legal system can be a mystery to English lawyers and there are plenty aspects of Scots law which are (understandably) entirely alien to our friends south of the border. One area of practice on which Scots and English lawyers can agree is the principles applicable to the interpretation o

The law commissions of England, Scotland and Wales have produced a joint report setting out their recommendations for a regulatory framework concerning automated vehicles. If the idea of vehicles capable of driving themselves dominating the local high street seems at present somewhat futuristic, sof

The perverse jury can be a fair fickle beast. The acquital of four defendants who quite clearly broke the law when they pulled down the statue of Edward Colston is a case in point. Manifestly, it was wantonly remiss of Bristol's Labour Council and Mayor to risk leaving the said effigy of the reprehe

To those of us who dealt daily with the law of prejudice to criminal court proceedings, the claim by the Metropolitan Police force that the publication of the Sue Gray Report might prejudice their criminal inquiry into alleged breaches of the Covid Regulations is surprising, to say the least. The pr

"A veritable maze" was how Professors Gretton and Reid described the enforcement provisions of standard securities. It is for that reason that the Scottish Law Commission's (SLC) discussion paper on the reform of the law of heritable securities is a very welcome publication, writes Andrew Scott

On 22 December the Scottish government ushered in a reform of the legal services market that has been sitting on the statute books for more than a decade, when it authorised the Law Society of Scotland to begin acting as an approved regulator under the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010. This change

Copycat branding is nothing new; we regularly see it happening where a store sells an own-brand product (usually for a lower price) that very closely resembles a name-brand product. So, where should we draw the line between harmless lookalike and detrimental copycat? Last year, high-end gin company

What could have been done better in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? Has any aspect of the response broken Scots criminal law? Are there any circumstances in which compensation should be paid to those who have suffered the disease or to relatives of those who have passed because of it? Though