Absolvitor: Scots Law Online

Now that Scotland is enjoying it’s very own Da Vinci mystery, I thought I should have a shot at unravelling the tale for you. This potted version is taken from various newspaper reports I have been reading over the past few days. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

Once upon time there was a Duke, and the Duke had a very expensive painting of Jesus, and his Mum (that is to say, the Virgin Mary, not the Duke’s Mum). Anyway, some bad men stole the painting, and this made the Duke very sad (not to mention about £50 Million poorer). Needless to say, the little gnomes who worked for his insurance company were not too pleased about it either.

Because the Duke had never seen The Thomas Crown Affair, or Entrapment or Ocean’s Twelve or any of the other classic art theft movies (like Bean) he doesn’t appear to have invested in even basic security devices like infra-red trip wires or anything. The bad men stole the painting by basically lifting of the wall in the Duke’s nice house (well, enormous Castle really), climbing through his window and waving an axe at a startled gardener.

Anyway, even though the police looked really hard, they couldn’t find the painting anywhere. This made the Duke even sadder, and he died about four years later, still wondering where his lovely painting might now be.

Then some very clever lawyers got involved. One lawyer was contacted by some mysterious people (who were definitely not the bad men who stole the painting, but nonetheless didn’t really want anyone to know exactly who they were). The mysterious people said they had the Duke’s painting (although they didn’t say how they had got it).

So the clever lawyer told the mysterious people that as the painting was stolen, they should give it to the police immediately so that the Duke’s family could have it back.

Sorry, my mistake! Actually, what the lawyer did was to get in touch with some more lawyers who had a think about what would be the best thing to do. The best thing, they decided, was to contact the insurance company gnomes, and ask them if the Duke’s family would be interested in having their painting back? And also … if the family might be willing to pay the mysterious people a reward of, say, £4.25 Million?

The insurance gnomes asked why the mysterious people didn’t just tell the police about the painting. But the clever lawyers were worried that the mysterious people were a little bit volatile and might do something “very silly” with the painting if the police wanted to take it away from them (like, for example, wearing it as a dress).

But insurance gnomes aren’t stupid, so they pretended not to call the police – and actually they did call the police. And the police prentended to be the Duke’s servants while they went to (and covertly filmed) a meeting at the offices of some very respectable and clever lawyers in Glasgow. The clever lawyers wanted to drink some tea and talk about the reward for the mysterious people, but the Duke’s servants (who were really the police in disguise) had come with a warrant, and only wanted to get the Duke’s painting back, and arrest everyone – without waiting for them to finish their tea.

The painting of Jesus and his Mum playing with some wool doesn’t stay at the Duke’s Castle any more. It has gone to live at a big Museum with laser beams and guard dogs (probably) – where it will be nice and safe. And the mysterious people and their clever lawyers have gone to court, where a serious judge and fifteen nervous jurors have to decide whether they should go to jail for a very long time.

Even though, as the clever lawyer’s clever lawyer (Donald Findlay QC) says, there was “Nothing covert, nothing secretive, nothing, on the face of it, underhand about this at all.”

According to Wikipedia, the painting of Jesus and his Mum playing with some wool is called The Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Madonna dei Fusi). It depicts the Virgin Mary with the Christ child, who looks longingly at a yarnwinder which the Virgin could use to measure off yarn. The yarnwinder serves as a symbol both of Mary’s domesticity and the Cross on which Christ was crucified, and may also suggest the Fates, understood in classical mythology as spinners.

Look at me! Look at me! I’m in the Scotsman, and on St. David’s Day as well – how ironic.

In case you’re wondering why I’m not quoted, it’s because I forgot to phone the journalist back until he’d gone on holiday! So the following has been cribbed directly from our website, I think.

”
Mr Nisbet is a partner at GLC and head of its national Education Law Unit, which he set up in 2002 soon after joining GLC. He acts for parents and pupils in education cases involving discrimination or additional support needs, but also offers training or advice on all aspects of education law to education bodies and schools.
”

PS. Just realised that the heading is richer in innuendo than I had intended. No matter – you know what I meant!

I see from a number of blogs (mostly from India, for some reason) Michael Mancini has evaded justice.

As you may remember, Mr. Mancini was the motorist issue with a £60 fixed penalty notice for not being in control of his vehicle while blowing his nose in a traffic jam. Outraged, he refused to pay.

He was prepared to face the judgement of the court but prosecutors in Ayrshire decided to take no further action. He is quoted as saying “I’m relieved it’s now all behind me and I’ve cleared my name. I was determined to fight this and go to court because I know I did nothing wrong,”

It was also reported that the police officer who issued out the notice has earned the nickname “PC Shiny Buttons” for his over-zalous approach to policing. This is the same man, apparently, who last year issued a £50 fixed penalty to a man who accidentally dropped a £10 note in the street.

Of course, that guy’s not my favourite policeman. No, that would be these guys …

At the same time as the Scottish Government were revealed to have plans to set up a special body to run a future referendum on independence (thus bypassing the Electoral Commission), an interesting legal opinion has been released on an independent Scotland’s place in the European Union.

According to the Barcelona Reporter, the unnamed professor from Stanford University opines that as the EU Treaties do not explicitly provide for “internal expansion” caused by the cecession of territories within Member States, “the rules of customary international law” would apply.

Therefore, the report indicates, such new States (e.g. Catalunya; or Scotland) would not require to apply for membership of the EU, but simply to ask for recognition of their new status.

The report even lays out ways in which the fledging States could make straight a highway to internal expansion: i.e. preparing the “founding documents” that is, a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution; and submission to the European Court of Arbitration.

I note that October’s edition of the Safer Communities journal has an interesting article called “Scotland’s approach to hate crime law.”

The abstract reads as follows:

Hate crime law and the criminal justice system in Scotland are different and distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. This article presents an overview of the development of hate crime legislation in the country, including: racist hate crime; religious prejudice statutory aggravation covered by section 74 in the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 and dealing with Protestant/Catholic sectarianism; and the Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Act 2009, relating to offences motivated by malice and ill will on grounds of disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity, the coverage of the last being unique in Europe. The legislation was enacted after lengthy consultations and achieving a broad consensus. It was agreed that a statutory aggravation of motivation by prejudice was not the appropriate way to deal with age related and gender based crimes and more work was needed. Scotland has not extended the offence of stirring up racial hatred to other forms of hatred. Compared to England and Wales, hate crime prosecution rates are significantly higher in Scotland, and the number of racially aggravated charges, per population, are four times higher. To what extent this is due to more crime, more reporting or a different approach to dealing with crime is not yet determined. The country’s proactive approach to dealing with race and religion hate crime was to be extended to disability, sexual orientation and transgender soon after the legislation was enacted.

I tend to think that this approach to crime is prone to difficulties as inevitably more and more categories are added to the list of aggravations. What about gender? Or age? Or social class? Shouldn’t we be stamping out these hate crimes too? And if the list is too long then all offences end up being aggravated and, therefore, none of them are. To quote W.S. Gilbert from The Gondoliers “When everybody’s somebody – then no-one’s anybody.”

My new Yell.com solicitors blog post is all about the new HM Prison Low Moss, which is just down the road from where I live.

However, I will confess that in our household, the only prison we take an active interest in is HM Slammer.

My first tweetle (is that the right word?)! My previous post on CCTV in the workplace made such a huge impression on the Interwebs that Yancey Thomas, with his Work Privacy tweddle-feed made a link to it with this twootum.

I love twitter – maybe I should twitling too? What do you think?