Stewart Baker, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, reports on the Volokh Conspiracy blog, (hat tip, Instapundit) that the Lockerbie bomber has died, three years after being released by the Scottish government because he was allegedly going to die in three weeks. Scottish Prime Minister Alex Salmond, Baker notes, is still unapologetic about this hideous decision and says it resulted from “due process of Scots law.” But I think Baker gets one thing wrong. Salmond’s post and the separate Scottish Parliament were created pursuant to a 1999 United Kingdom law generally referred to as devolution. But the existence of a body of Scottish law separate from English law is guaranteed by the Act of Union of 1707, which united England and Scotland into one kingdom but allowed Scotland to retain its separate legal system and its separate established Church of Scotland. As a result, the Queen is head not only of the Anglican Church of England but also of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. I think we can be pretty sure she’s an Anglican, but I’ll bet she worships at Church of Scotland services at least part of the time she spends in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and her estate in Balmoral each summer.
Scottish law should be familiar to followers of American politics, since in 1999 Senator Arlen Specter said that on the impeachment of Bill Clinton he favored the Scottish verdict of not proven, which is a third alternative to guilty and not guilty under Scottish law.
