Gàidhlig / English
Cùirtean, Cùisean-lagha agus Ceartas

Cùirtean, Cùisean-lagha agus Ceartas

Posted by Garry on 18 May, 2026

As every son of a mother and daughter of a father knows, the Court of Law and the Court of Justice are not the same thing.  Over the centuries, there has been many a notorious, legal case in which justice was not done.¹  From the cases of Jesus Christ and ‘James of the Glen’ to those of Alfred Dreyfus, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter and many, other, innocent people,there are countless examples on record of unjust sentences being handed down in the law-courts.

According to the proverb, “the justice of the unjust is twisted”;² and, unfortunately, from time to time over the centuries, the judges themselves have not always been just and honourable in passing judgment.  In such cases, according to another, reliable saying, “a friend in the court is better than a crown in one’s wallet”.³  That is, if it would be necessary to give money to the judge in order to receive a just judgment from the court and if the accused person had sufficient money, then it would be better for this person to give a bribe to the judge than to keep his money and lose in the court.  “The law is both just and unjust”,⁴ it is said; and, clearly, as laid down by the judges, “the law has been both just and unjust” at times in centuries past.

But what about matters in our time ?  Is justice always done in the courts of Scotland and those of the United Kingdom?  Well, again unfortunately, it’s not.  Although we have a group of courts (including the Sheriff Court; the High Court; the Court of Session; and the Supreme Court) which deal with legal cases at different levels and provide opportunities to appeal against almost every judgment, it is not in every case that justice is done.  With that said, since there exist both other groups which are involved in working against injustice in the justice system (such as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission) and multi-national courts (such as the European Court of Human Rights) which hear appeals against judgments from the national courts, there is not as much injustice around nowadays as there was in centuries past.  Well, it is to be hoped that there is not!

 

* Footnotes ¹, ², ³ & ⁴:  see ‘Corpas na Gàidhlig’ within the DASG website.

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