IT has not been a very good week for Scots law and the Scottish legal establishment, but if our lawyers react properly, the Yes cause will be boosted.

The revelations in court in midweek that the former Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, now judge Lord Mulholland, had sanctioned a malicious prosecution against two of the administrators of the collapsed Rangers FC was bad enough, but add that to news that the current Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC continued the case until collapsing it last week and you have a storm which will not abate, at least until the case – which could cost the taxpayer millions – is over.

Lord Mulholland and the Lord Advocate can answer for themselves and will eventually have to do so, but who is going to speak for the entire Scottish legal establishment and Scots law itself which is under threat from the Westminster Government as never before?

Thanks to another fine piece of whistleblowing by Joanna Cherry, the SNP’s justice spokesperson in the Commons, we now know that the issue of judicial reviews in Scotland’s courts will be examined by the UK Government’s new commission on these reviews, headed up by Lord Edward Faulks, the former Minister of State in a Tory Government.

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Not another bloody committee, I hear you say, but this one has a sinister motive most probably put in place by Dominic Cummings, and that is try to reduce the scrutiny of the Government by the courts. The Ministry of Justice can dress it up all it likes, but no one in politics and the law seriously doubts that this commission is all about reducing judicial reviews, those cases in which judges basically have to decide whether what the Government is doing is legal or not.

The Faulks Commission will undoubtedly have to look at the Scottish system of judicial reviews for one simple reason – the law is clear that the UK Government is answerable to the courts of all the jurisdictions of the UK. The Commission will have to look at all the jurisdictions for one obvious reason – if someone can’t get a judicial review of a UK Government action in England, then they can simply go to Edinburgh and request it through the Court of Session. You can bet the commission will take measures to prevent that happening.

Which is where the threat to Scots law comes in.

The existence and preservation of Scots law was guaranteed by Article 19 of the Act of Union and since then no government has dared to threaten what we might call the sovereignty of Scots law.

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Yes, there have been many challenges to Scots law’s existence in the 313 years since the Act of Union, but any changes to the laws of Scotland have had to be put through the Westminster Parliament and, since 1999, our parliament in Holyrood.

Some very controversial amendments to the laws of Scotland have been made down south over the years, most notably the act which brought in the Poll Tax, and the establishment of the Supreme Court. But as per Article 19, all of these were approved by the “Parliament of Great Britain” as the article states.

You might say judicial reviews are used too often for political purposes, to try and stop the elected government doing what it wants, as happened with Joanne Cherry’s successful judicial review of Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament. But that action was not party political and would not have succeeded had the UK Government not been acting unlawfully – it’s just that sort of legal scrutiny that Johnson and Cummings want to avoid in future.

The minutiae of judicial reviews are probably beyond the ken of most people, but we can all understand when a bullying government illegally tries to railroad through changes to our laws.

We can also understand this very important point: that civil justice is a devolved matter and any attempt to limit Scots law in this fashion is yet another power grab – we could call it the “lawgrab”.

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There are already rumblings in the Scottish legal profession about resisting any moves to alter Scots law’s procedures, though one expert told me that the presence on the commission of Dundee law professor Alan Page will at least ensure proper examination of the matters under review.

The fact remains, however, that the Faulks Commission can and probably will alter the laws on judicial reviews which, frankly, are never spuriously allowed, as one Donald J. Trump could testify after being refused one in the Court of Session in 2013.

On my reading of Article 19, any change to Scots law will have to go before the Westminster and Holyrood Parliaments for approval. Picking a fight with politicians is Johnson’s stock-in-trade, but I dare him, I double dare him, to have a pop at Scotland’s lawyers.