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As an academic opposed to wildlife crime and with no ‘huntin/shootin/fishin’ interests (or indeed abilities) to declare, I have penned this article as a follow up response to my colleague Professor Peter Duff’s recent contribution to this blog relating to the correctness of recent Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service…

The World Water Congress is held under the auspices of the 50 year old International Water Resources Association (IWRA), in collaboration with governments. The Congress attracts hundreds of academics, practitioners, policy makers and members of civil society organisations working on water related issues at global, regional and national levels.

The…

Non-lawyers might be bewildered by the recent decisions of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) not to proceed with prosecution in a series of cases where the RSPB has video footage of employees of large estates setting traps for or killing protected birds of prey (as reported by…

The recent tragic upsurge in terrorist activity in England has been accompanied by significant media and social media hyperbole. Stripping away the regrettable politicking and naked electioneering underpinning this is part of the exasperated academic lawyer’s job.

This short piece outlines and comments on current UK law as it stands…

On 26 May 2017, the King’s Conference Centre at the University of Aberdeen hosted a lecture and panel discussion about Scotland’s land as part of the May Festival. This event built on a series of events that Malcolm Combe (a Lecturer at the School of Law) and colleagues at the…

I was very pleased to be able to contribute to the recently-published Comparing Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2017), edited by Jørn Sunde, Søren Koch and Knut Skodvin, all of the University of Bergen, Norway.

This book was primarily written to introduce undergraduate students at Bergen to one intriguing way of…

It is fairly well-established that cost is the primary driver for corporate choice of law and the choice of the physical location of a company’s business. Becht et al, for example, note that entry cost is the primary consideration for choice of corporate law. These authors also note that non-price…

The High Court ordered the Government to publish its strategy against air pollution on the 9th of  May. European Union Law obliges the UK to develop and publish a plan to reduce nitrogen dioxide levels in the air to an acceptable level. For quite a while now, the development and…

In February 2017 Shell lodged plans to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) to undertake the decommissioning of offshore petroleum installations in the Brent Field, located in the North Sea, north east of the Shetland Islands. The Brent field is an iconic field, having commenced production in…

This blog post originally appeared as an online article for the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland, available here. It is reproduced here with permission.

The law relating to leases of rural property in Scotland has long been an area replete with special considerations. There is a surfeit of…