Apr 14 2008
Who and what
I am an advocate at the Scottish bar, in Edinburgh. If your interest is legal-professional, I am a member of the Murray Stable. My professional and contact details are on this page.
This is intended as a conventional blog, as the header suggests, on disparate matters which interest me or which I think deserve a public airing they might not otherwise receive. I intend to seek occasional guest contributions.
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.
