Scots law: a system in search of a family?

Abstract

The concept of legal families is familiar to most comparativists and although miscegenation is an increasingly common feature in a global community, arguably an understanding of family origins may help to anticipate differences of approach, ideology, attitudes to law and diverging normative values. Classification into families, despite various criticisms and disagreements as to which families there are or how they should be distinguished, provides a useful tool for the comparativists and those seeking, reform, unification or harmonisation.
The Scottish legal system, however, is one that tends to elude classification. Even where “mixed” or “hybrid” legal systems are recognised, that of Scotland may be omitted or distinguished from those of, for example, Greece, South Africa, Israel or the Seychelles.
This begs the question, what is a legal system and how is it distinguished? This paper examines the Scottish legal system, taking as its starting point a focus on juristic style as the key distinguishing feature of a legal system and looking at the key elements that eminent comparativists Zweigert and Kötz suggest shape this. These are: the historical background and development; its typical mode of thought; its distinctive institutions; the types of legal sources it acknowledges; and its ideology. Looking particularly at the academic debates that have arisen in Scotland concerning the nature and identity of Scots law, the paper goes on to
consider whether the claim to a distinct legal system is anything more than a manifestation of the fact that “each political society in the world has its own law”,^₁ and that in fact the time has come to abandon the notion of families.