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1/9 I was just listening to Iain Dale's interview with David Starkey, whom I would title a hilariously hysterical English Nationalist. He did, however, for a brief moment, say something which I thought was interesting and it was the following:
2/9 "Again, if you look at the judgment of the Inner House of the Court of Session in Scotland it again employs completely abstract principles"
3/9 This reminded me of a series of video clips that I watched back in 2008 wherein a professor by name of Alan Macfarlane talks about the English legal system, and among other things he mentions this:
4/9 "Our [England's] legal system is based on custom [precedent]. Most legal systems in the world are based on legal principles in which you don't really need to know about the past, you just interpret the principles. Roman law, for example, is like that."
5/9 This, in turn, reminded me of the nature of Scots law which, as described by Wikipedia, "is a hybrid or mixed legal system containing civil law and common law elements,". The term "civil law" refers to legal systems that are primarily based on Roman law.
6/9 In these systems, legal principles as well as the vast bulk of law are codified into statutes as opposed to the law consisting, primarily, of the sum of prior court decisions which is called precedent.
7/9 Given that Scots law, indeed, does contain elements of civil law it seems to me that Scottish judges not only citing precedent, but also citing and inferring principles is a completely natural consequence of what Scots law is.
8/9 This is something the German Constitutional Court would most certainly do in regard to the articles of the German Basic Law that deals with fundamental rights. The French Constitutional Council I would expect to do the same in regard to the Declaration on the Rights of Man.
9/9 Scotland is a European nation for many reasons, but thanks to English Nationalist in Chief, David Starkey, I think that we have just identified another. I should think this makes it obvious why the Court of Session sits well next to the European Court of Justice.
