ABSTRACT
Any English lawyer who has the temerity to tangle with the Scottish aspects of Law and Religion needs constantly, like ‘the past’, legal Scotland ‘is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. This chapter explores some very basic theoretical concepts about the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority, presents a history of religion in Scotland from the Scots Reformation in 1560 to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. The classic early commentary on the wider issues of religion in Scots law is Alexander Taylor Innes’s The Law of Creeds in Scotland, first published in 1867, with a second edition in 1902. Francis Lyall was primarily concerned with the case law; and his account of what is commonly known as the ‘Ten Years’ Conflict’ leading up to the Disruption of 1843 is a meticulous discussion of disputes that arose as a result of two Acts of the General Assembly passed in 1934: the Veto Act and the Chapel Act.
