For King's staff and students

The position in Scotland

Scotland is not, like England and Wales, a common law jurisdiction. The Scottish legal system is based in large part on Roman law, and is therefore related to the modern civilian legal systems of Europe. Despite the Act of Union 1707, creating a single United Kingdom Parliament, the Scottish courts have remained entirely independent of the English and Welsh system. The only points of contact are that civil appeals from the Inner House of the Court of Session (the Scottish equivalent of the Court of Appeal) lie to the House of Lords in London, and appeals on devolution issues lie to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, also in London, whose judges are largely the same as the House of Lords. As a result of the devolution of power by the United Kingdom Parliament, the recently created Scottish Parliament, set up under the Scotland Act 1998, has power to legislate for a wide range of matters (as set out in section 29 of the Act). Scottish legislation now has its own website. There are also other Scottish law websites, such as Scottish Law Online.

In Scotland there are no coroners on the English model. Instead, investigations into certain deaths are carried out by the local public prosecutor, who is called the Procurator Fiscal. In some cases, an inquiry may be held in open court, before the local Sheriff (judge), under the Fatal Accidents and Sudden Deaths Inquiry (Scotland) Act 1976. The Sheriff is not (like the coroner) a specialist in inquiries into death, but a generalist, dealing with all kinds of court cases, criminal and civil. The determinations of such Inquiries are available on the Scottish Courts' website (follow "Structured Search" and under "Type of Opinion" select Fatal Accident Inquiry).

The standard textbook is Carmichael, Sudden Deaths and Fatal Accident Inquiries, 2nd edition 1993, W Green/Sweet & Maxwell (a new edition is due in December 2004).
 

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