Talk:MacCormick v Lord Advocate

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Politics of the United Kingdom

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Politics of the United Kingdom on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Politics of the United KingdomWikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomTemplate:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomPolitics of the United Kingdom articles

??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

More information:
/
	This article has been automatically rated by a bot or other tool because one or more other projects use this class. Please ensure the assessment is correct before removing the `\|auto=` parameter.

Law Low‑importance

	Law portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.LawWikipedia:WikiProject LawTemplate:WikiProject Lawlaw articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Mainly from stuff Google could find. If someone with access to a decent law library could confirm and expand things, that would be helpful. Marnanel 00:36, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Importance?[edit]

Quoth the article:

The outcome of this case became of great relevance in 1999, when the British parliament was proposing the creation of a Scottish parliament.

Can someone explain why this is so? --Jfruh 7 July 2005 13:45 (UTC)

I think that text is confusing different bills. The legislation creating the Scottish Parliament was passed in 1998. There were, I think, some clauses that changed provisions previously set down by the Act of Union - I think the minimum number of Scottish seats in the Commons was one. There is also popular confusion about just where sovereignty does lie in the Scottish constitutional set-up and whether or not Westminster could unilaterally abolish the Scottish Parliament if the Scottish political or popular will (how formally expressed?) is hostile - it can clearly repeal the legislation but would that have force in Scotland?

In 1999 the issue wasn't the Scottish Parliament but rather the House of Lords. The Act of Union included provisions for a minimum number of Scottish hereditary peers to sit in the Lords. There were concerns that the abolition of the right of all hereditary peers to sit would disadvantage Scotland especially and whether that removal would be contrary to the Act of Union. Timrollpickering (talk) 15:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright question[edit]

On 13 November 2005, I added the text of the Lord President's opinion in this case. I noted that "Opinions of the Scottish courts are nominally crown copyright, but copyright is waived so long as quotation is accurate." On 9 December, however, Cynical deleted this with an assertion that this text was in some way the copyright of a commercial publisher, Westlaw. That assertion is wrong. I have reverted the deletion. This note is to explain the true copyright position.

in the UK, judicial opinions are generally accepted to be Crown copyright (though there is an argument that they are copyright of individual judges, or that they were so until 1988; see 'Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom'). This opinion was issued in 1953, so it passed out of copyright in 2003 (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 163(2)). In any event, it has been agreed since at least the mid-nineteenth century that judgments (as opposed to added-value material such as headnotes, footnotes) may be freely reproduced so long as the reproduction is accurate, and no publisher has ever sought permission to reproduce judgements; section 45(2) of the 1988 Act is generally accepted as authorising this, but to avoid any doubt HMSO has made this right clear informally. Nor has any publisher ever suggested that reproduction of the text of judgments breaches their copyright; they would be cutting their own throats if they did so!

All that was added was the text of the opinion itself. What I think Cynical may have had in mind is the commentary in the Session Cases edition of the report, which was not reproduced. Until 1957, the Session Cases were published by the Faculty of Advocates, which accordingly holds the copyright in the commentary on this case (and on its typography, also not reproduced). From 1958, Session Cases were published by the Scottish Council of Law Reporting (SCLR), which accordingly holds that copyright (and which asserts it). Since 2003, the SCLR has contracted with a number of commercial publishers to publish electronic versions of the Session Cases back to 1930. One of these (not the first) is Westlaw, who Cynical refers to as copyright-holder in the text of the judgment. In fact, none of these publishers have any more than a non-exclusive licence to publish in the first place; SCLR continues to retain copyright in its original work. But neither the commercial publishers, nor SCLR, have, or claims to have, any copyright in the work which SCLR, and before it the Faculty of Advocates, took from the judges with neither express permission nor payment (as they were entitled to, because neither were ever sought by the judges or by the Crown).

What was added, and now reinstated, is accordingly copyright-free. Ariwara 18:46, 5 January 2006 (UTC) .[reply]

I would agree with that statement. Astrotrain 11:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If we can use it, it ought to be in Wikisource, not here. Hairy Dude 05:15, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Link Problem[edit]

The external link "Discussion of the case" pointing to www.lawscot.org.uk/whatis/case8.html results in a 404 error (at this time at least). Possibly the page might be restricted to Law Society members, or perhaps it's gone. Perhaps someone who knows could resolve this? slàinte Anihl 01:00, 1 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Obiter Dictum?[edit]

The comment about Parliamentary Supremacy appears to have been made obiter dictum and are not binding on future judges.Google books result — Preceding unsigned comment added by Thom2002 (talk • contribs) 19:04, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on MacCormick v Lord Advocate. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 00:24, 15 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]