Apr 14 2008
What
Published by JM : 
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This is intended as a conventional blog, as the header suggests, on matters to do with Scots law, or legal practice in Scotland, which interest me or which I think deserve a public airing they might not otherwise receive. I welcome comments, long or short, but they are moderated and may not be published for a little time. Comments which ask or demand specific legal advice will generally be deleted, and I am unlikely to answer them unless they have some special interest (to me, not to the commenter).
Copyright and re-publication
Anything I write here can be freely re-published elsewhere without asking permission, so long as it is credited to this site, under the terms of this Creative Commons Licence. So can comments, but note the author’s name or pseudonym.
Scottish and UK governmental material on or downloadable from this site, including case reports, is Crown copyright and is reproduced under licence; practically all such material may be freely reproduced. Faculty of Advocates materials are copyright of the Faculty of Advocates. There is no copyright in those works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott reproduced, or in the 1852 and 1877 maps.
Privacy policy
This site fully meets all European standards of personal data protection and privacy as in force from 11 December 2003. It neither asks for nor collects any information on its visitors. It does not collect email addresses, other than for the purposes of the email mailing list and from commenters, in each case the submission of an email address being voluntary. All email links on the site are obvious. It does record the IP addresses of visiting computers for the collection of statistics on traffic visiting and returning to the site. This information is not disclosed to third parties. There are no cookies other than for statistics collection (Google Analytics and Awstats) and these can be disabled by the reader with no loss of functionality.
Old site
My old site, now archived at this address, deserves a valediction. It was largely written in 2003, at a time when almost all of the few Scottish legal websites were — even by the standards of the time — horribly designed and unhelpful to anyone looking for information on the workings of the Scottish legal system. Seeking to fill that gap, my main aim was to provide material that was not readily available elsewhere. That was not the culture of the time. I was pleased at the reviews the site attracted, but less pleased at how big a commitment the site quickly grew into.
By about 2006, several other Scottish legal sites had been substantially improved; some of these provided equivalent or better versions of material on my site. Thus, for example, much of my jurisdiction section was rendered pointless when the Statute Law Database was finally launched to the public in December 2006, something I had been banging on about for years. The Murray Stable site, launched in February 2006, was in effect the first modern collective advocates site; and it held my personal-professional information in a form I was very comfortable with. I had neither the time, nor the energy, to maintain, update, and improve my site: it had grown too large and looked increasingly old-fashioned. If I was to keep it up at all, I felt I would have to rewrite it. That did not interest me. For the last three years, I have left it almost untouched. It was time to move on. The natural replacement was a blog format.
Some of the material on my old site is still not available elsewhere, even in plagiarised form. So I have left it as an archive. If you bookmarked a page there and can’t find it again, try the search facility in the sidebar
