Scots Law Quotes

If anything in their history demonstrates that the Scots are remarkable, it is that in spite of being physically attached to England, they have survived as a people, with their own culture, laws, institutions, and, like the English, their own ideas.

the way to inscribe the will of God on the hearts of people in this world is not by way of law or vote but by way of redemption through Jesus. Jesus’ kingdom vision is for his redeemed people and for them alone.

The Scots knew that the burning of a cross was a summons to the clan, and to all the kinsmen of all kindred clans: a summons to rally to the cross for battle. And the burning cross was raised only by the chief of the clan. By ancient law, once raised, the burning cross committed the clan to defend the land unto the end of the clan.

When a slave must be executed, the slaves from those plantations nearby are brought to watch; a deterrent, aye? against future ill-considered action.” “Indeed,” Jamie said politely. “I believe that was the Crown’s notion in executing my grandsire on Tower Hill after the Rising. Verra effective, too; all my relations have been quite well behaved since.” I had lived long enough among Scots to appreciate the effects of that little jab. Jamie might have come at Campbell’s request, but the grandson of the Old Fox did no man’s bidding lightly—nor necessarily held English law in high regard. MacNeill had got the message, all right; the back of his neck flushed turkey-red, but Farquard Campbell looked amused. He uttered a short, dry laugh before turning round.

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.

I. Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led; Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victorie! II. Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour: See approach proud Edward's pow'r-- Chains and slaverie! III. Wha will be a traitor-knave? Wha can fill a coward's grave? Wha sae base as be a slave! Let him turn and flee! IV. Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand, or freeman fa', Let him follow me! V. By oppression's woes and pains! By our sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! VI. Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!-- Let us do or die!

The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell's Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officials have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell's Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence "disappear." The Hell's Angels are very close-mouthed about this, but it is a well-known fact among public officials. ... About halfway through our talk I got a strong whiff of the transmogrification factor, but I was hardly prepared for the mayor's special fillip on it. There were plenty of Hell's Angels at the riot, "but they escaped, " he explained, "behind a wall of fire." While he elaborated on this I checked my calendar to make sure I hadn't lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass. But no, it wasn't like that. The mayor was not loath to give details of the escape; he wanted law enforcement agencies everywhere to be warned of the Angels' methods. Knowledge is power, he opined.

John Bull is ignorant of the States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. [...] His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described ; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence, - a University man, as the phrase goes, - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London ; among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter of law." He had never heard of the Scots law: nor did he choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.

It is the foot-loose, those who have nothing to lose and much to gain, and (quite naturally) those who have not scrupulously kept all the laws—or who have felt the heavy hand of church discipline--who are most attracted to a new frontier. The first miners in California, the debtors sent to Georgia, the 'criminals' deported to Australia, were likewise held in scorn by upright stay-at-homes. What they made of themselves, and what their sons became, indicate that, for all the hard things said about them, they were hardly 'the scum of the nation.

With religious vilification laws now coming to Britain and undoubtedly elsewhere in the West, Scot’s question rings out with global implications and must be answered. If it is inciting hatred against Muslims when non-Muslims simply explore what Islam and the Qur’an actually teach, then there cannot be a reasonable public discussion of Islam. Such legal protections actually make Muslims a separate class, beyond criticism, precisely at the moment when the West needs to examine the implications of having admitted people with greater allegiance to Islamic law than to pluralism, freedom, and democracy.

Philosophy is one of those subjects, like astrophysics and neurosurgery, that are not for the fainthearted. To delve into the absolutes of the human experience, to seek to advance the progress of enlightenment first expounded by the likes of the revered Aristotle and Plato, to search for the answers to the profound questions of the universe, often at the risk of deadly reprisal from entrenched powers, requires not only brilliance and tenacity but a deep sense of purpose. But even among this select fraternity, [René] Descartes stands out. From him did we get practical discoveries like coordinates in geometry and the law of refraction of light. But what he really did was to shake loose the human mind from the shackles of centuries of stultifying religious orthodoxy by creating an entirely original approach to reasoning: the Cartesian method.

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error.

To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that “we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained.” “Lynch’s Law,” and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture—an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people.

Scots had become what was called the “low” language and metropolitan English was now the medium of law, administration, education and religion. From the eighteenth century onwards, the gentry of Scotland increasingly tended to receive an English education. So in Mr. Sheridan’s “polite” and Adam Smith’s influential circles, English was the standard: no variety of Scots was codified. It even began to be disparaged and by its own people: books proliferated listing Scotticisms to be avoided in polite society. The Scots were assailed and harangued but in one sense of the phrase, they asked for it. And they made English work for them by turning out some of the finest philosophical prose in the language.

If you must break the law, do it to seize power.” —JULIUS CAESAR

Time is on the wane as the man said when the clock fell on the baby.’ (Wain is Scots for ‘baby’.)

Then there were those media figures who actually tried to put a happy face on Muslim extremism and Sharia law under the banner of cultural diversity. Surely the victims of honor killings, and those beaten and killed for not wearing headscarves, for dating men from outside their faith, or for trying to convert to another religion would strongly disagree.

The Russians wanted to enjoy the peace and prosperity of a civilized world, without the encumbrances of following any of its laws.

Vengeance was a necessary function of a civilized world, particularly at its margins, in its most remote and wild regions. Evildoers, unwilling to submit to the rule of law, needed to lie awake in their beds at night worried about when justice would eventually come for them. If laws and standards were not worth enforcing, then they certainly couldn’t be worth following.

There was no moral equivalence among systems of government, their leaders, or cultures. Any society that did not respect human rights or the rule of law could not consider itself the equal of those that did.

Because of an insularity among Englishmen, the country had been much represented abroad by foreigners. Under William III, those were Dutchmen, French Huguenots and Swiss and, in the later years of Anne's reign, by Scots now citizens of Great Britain.

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition . . . is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations.

We establish government precisely to put a check on other people’s avidity for our personal goods. Where property is, laws and government follow, not out of keen desire for them, but out of necessity.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But somewhere, some basic principles have to stick. Somewhere there has to be a firm base on which everything else can rest; otherwise, the law becomes the plaything of power, not its master.

For example, Stewart downplayed the “common” aspect of the commonsense philosophy, and implied it should really be read as “good sense”—in other words, that our commonsense judgments reflect “that prudence and discretion which are the foundation of successful conduct.” While the foundations of truth were still equally available to all human beings, it was also clear that, in that respect, some are more equal than others. A trained political economist such as Adam Smith, Stewart would argue, will have more insight into the laws of human behavior, and be better able to predict how a certain fiscal policy will compel people to act, than the people themselves. Likewise, an experimental scientist such as Joseph Black will be able to offer a more comprehensive and more precise account of our daily reality than our own untrained and unscientific understanding.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs.

their reliance on a loyal circle of uncles and aunts, nephews and sons-in-law, to pool capital and lay off risk.

The law is a means to an end—and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But somewhere, some basic principles have to stick.

love of independence and property, the most steady and industrious of all human appetites.” Commercial society supplies that “love of independence” in abundance. It encourages men to overturn custom and tradition, and establish a new kind of law, based on a free circulation of goods and services.

By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures—the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.

John does not adjudicate how to engage in politics. Instead, John instructs Christians how to discern the moral character of governments and politicians and policies and laws.

So, what do these (re)interpretations look like?3 First, some have said the Sermon is really Moses or the law ramped up to the highest level and that Jesus’ intent is not to summon his followers to do these things but to show just how wretchedly sinful they are and how much they are in need of Christ’s righteousness. The Sermon, then, is nothing but a mirror designed to reveal our sinfulness. Second, others assign the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon to the private level, sometimes as little more than disposition or intention or striving and other times to how Christians live personally and privately as a Christian but not how they live publicly. The Sermon, then, is a code for private morality. Third, others think these sayings belong only to the most committed of disciples, whether monk, nun, priest, pastor, or radical. If they are designed only for the hypercommitted, the ordinary person can pass them by. The Sermon is for the elite Christian. Fourth, the tendency today is to see the Sermon as preceded by something, and that something is the gospel and that gospel is personal salvation and grace. That means that the Sermon is a sketch of the Christian life but only for those who have been so transformed by grace that they see the demands not as law but as grace-shaped ethics that can only be done by the person who lives by the Spirit. The Sermon, then, is Christian ethics, but it can only be understood once someone understands a theology of grace.

According to the ancient Salic law, women were barred from the throne of France.

Cruz’s first day as a full-time MSD student was January 11, 2016. On February 5, 2016, a woman called the Broward sheriff’s office to report an Instagram post in which Cruz showed off a gun and wrote, “I am going to get this gun and shoot up the school.” The officer who responded to the call, Edward Eason, informed the woman that Cruz’s Instagram post “was protected by the First Amendment right of free speech.”1 When the woman asked Eason whether there would be any way to prevent Cruz from buying a gun when he turned eighteen, the officer told her that his right to purchase a firearm was protected by the Second Amendment and nothing could be done. Eason was wrong on both counts. Threatening to shoot up a school is a felony that, if successfully prosecuted, could have prohibited Cruz from buying a firearm. (And even if Cruz was not convicted, an arrest could have gone a long way toward law enforcement taking future reports about Cruz seriously.) But Eason declined even to write a police report about the call, a decision for which he later received a three-day suspension. He did, however, according to his logs, notify MSD’s school resource officer, Scot Peterson.

Brecht, on the other hand, who had actually worked steadfastly for the Communist cause, played the opposite game: He answered questions with ambiguous generalities that defied easy interpretation. Call it the Campanella strategy. Brecht even wore a suit—a rare event for him-and made a point of smoking a cigar during the proceedings, knowing that a key committee member had a passion for cigars. In the end he charmed the committee members, who let him go scot-free.

The kingdom is the people under King Jesus who fellowship with one another and form churches. These churches are the politic of Jesus in this world. That is, a local church embodies—or is designed by God to embody—the kingdom vision of Jesus in such a way that it tells the kingdom story. That is a politic, a witness to the world of a new worship, a new law, a new king, a new social order, a new peace, a new justice, a new economics, and a new way of life. Engagement at the pulpit level to endorse or denounce a candidate is a minor chord in God’s masterpiece. Rather than spending our time with candidates, kingdom politics means we embody all that the country could be and far more than it is by living out what Jesus calls us to do. As John Howard Yoder has said, “If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real.”2

We are in deep space, where rules don’t apply, where laws of physics turn toward each other and laugh, then cackle, then spit in our eyes.

This is the Ward. Save your lawsuits for lawful places.

Instead of striking back, which would be both justifiable and equal retribution and a part of Moses’ “no mercy” law, Jesus creates an almost laughable scene of grace: “turn to them the other cheek also.” This is how Jesus did respond (Matt 26:67).

Of the many ways to describe or articulate the Torah, two are pertinent in our text: one can either multiply laws so as to cover all possible situations, or one can reduce the law to its essence.

Jesus himself was law observant, but what distinguished his praxis was that he did so through the law of double love. To do the Torah through love is to do all the Torah says and more.

shall continue to be called the kingdom of Scotland and retain its ancient laws and liberties.

From her neck hung a magnificent jeweled pendant, the one she called “Great Harry,” a gift from her father-in-law

Jesus reduced the Torah to two points — loving God, loving others (the Jesus Creed) — not to abolish the many laws but to comprehend them and to see them in their innermost essence

Here is the collect for the renewal of life that can be used during morning prayers: O God, the King eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning: Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep your law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done your will with cheerfulness during the day, we may, when night comes, rejoice to give you thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Here's a standard evening prayer (from the compline service): Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep rest in peace. Amen. Before we finish off this chapter on learning to pray with Cranmer and the BCP, we need to give a brief glimpse of what is involved in a set routine with the BCP.

Too true,” said the little man with a laugh. “Thank you for coming.” “Don’t thank me. Thank the United States government. Which reminds me. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an—” “Are you actually Mirandizing me?” Harvath shrugged. “It’s a service we provide everyone now.” “Even suspected terrorists?” “You’ve been living in the mountains too long, my friend. We declared defeat in the war on terror about two years ago. We don’t even use the word terror anymore. There’s only ‘man-made disasters’ caused by disenfranchised groups who are really just ‘misunderstood.

The poet-king al-Mutamid was exiled to Morocco. When Cordoba fell to the invaders, his daughter-in-law Princess Zaida fled to Alfonso, who made her his concubine before converting her to Christianity and marrying her as Queen Isabella. In 2018 newspapers claimed that the British queen Elizabeth II was descended from the Prophet Muhammad, citing Zaida as her ancestor. Zaida had two daughters; one, Elvira, married Roger, the Hauteville count of Sicily; the other, Sancha, is the progenitor of a line of royalty, via Richard earl of Cambridge and Mary queen of Scots, to George I. It is a link between Islam and Christendom from a more cosmopolitan time. Al-Mutamid was descended from the Arab kings, the Lakhm of Iraq – royalty older than the Prophet but not related to him – and al-Mutamid was Zaida’s father-in-law, not her father. There is no evidence Zaida, let alone Elizabeth II, was descended from Muhammad.

Mary Stuart and Elizabeth both aimed at toleration in an intolerant age, in the same ways that Catherine de’ Medici, the mother-in-law of one and the almost mother-in-law of another English queen, labored her whole life to heal the rift between Catholic and Protestant in France. All three of these queens worked as diligently and as astutely as they might to restrain the fratricidal wars of Christian against Christian. What they had to hold up against that violent seismic shift in human sensibility was the orderly traditions of monarchy. If they did not ultimately succeed, they slowed and tempered the disorder and violence.