Imagined communities, imaginary conversations: failure and the construction of legal identities

Abstract

How might Scottish legal thought change in the context of a Scottish Parliament? When we ask this deceptively simple question, we encounter an immediate problem. It is a problem in some ways remarkably like the situation in 1707, except in inverse. Nothing like this has happened before to a mixed jurisdiction with a history such as Scotland's. To explore some aspects of this question, I would like to take the subject of jurisprudential thought as an aspect of legal identity. In doing so I shall take a broad view of what constitutes legal literature, and shall argue for the possibility of a Scottish jurisprudence, both critical and historical.