The 2009 Seminar

The 2009 seminar took place in the Raeburn Room of Old College, University of Edinburgh. It started at 11am on Thursday 11th June 2009 (registration opening at 10.30) and closed shortly prior to Lord Hope of Craighead's public lecture (in the Playfair Library) at 6.15pm on Friday 12th June. 

Lord Hope's lecture had the title "Crumbs from under the Master's Table: Some Thoughts on Distress". It was included in the Festchrift which was published following the seminar.

The following synopsis of the lecture was provided by Lord Hope:

"Sexual abusers seek out their victims in private: a girl in a tent, a woman alone late at night with a taxi-driver. There is distress, but there are no eyewitnesses and there is no physical injury. The lecturer recalls his dialogue with Sir Gerald through the pages of the Scottish Criminal Case Reports as to how the Scots law should deal with the problem of corroborating the victim's evidence of what was done to her."

The costs of the conference and public lecture were generously covered by support from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education, W. Green and the Scottish Universities Law Institute. The events were organised jointly by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.

The following speakers presented papers at the 2009 seminar, and revised versions of most of these papers were included in the Festschrift:

Professor Andrew Ashworth (Oxford): Children and criminal responsibility

Professor Eric Clive (Edinburgh): Codification of the criminal law

Dr Sharon Cowan (Edinburgh): The pain of pleasure: consent and the criminalisation of assaults

Professor Ian Dennis (UCL): Witness anonymity in the criminal process

Professors Antony Duff and Sandra Marshall (Stirling): Public and private wrongs

Professor Peter Duff (Aberdeen): Undisclosed and additional evidence: should the threshold be the same?

Professor Lindsay Farmer (Glasgow): The idea of principle in Scots criminal law

Professor Stuart Green (Rutgers): Theft by omission

Professor Finbarr McAuley (UCD): Statutory rape and defilement in Ireland: recent developments

Dr Claire McDiarmid (Strathclyde): The provocation defence

Professor Gerry Maher (Edinburgh): The structure of homicide

Professor Alan Norrie (King's College London): Mistaken self-defence and the formal structure of criminal law

Dr Robert Shiels: Crown Counsel: Sir Archibald Alison to Lord Brand

Professor Victor Tadros (Warwick): A human right to a fair criminal law?

Sheriff Tom Welsh QC: The summary jurisdiction to punish for contempt of court in criminal trials

The following two authors, while unable to speak at the conference, wrote papers for the Festschrift volume:

Peter Ferguson QC: The mental element in crime

Professor John Spencer (Cambridge): Codification of criminal procedure

Lord Rodger of Earlsferry and Professor Christopher Gane (Aberdeen) wrote a foreword and appreciation respectively, while Professor William McBryde took a portrait photograph of Sir Gerald for inclusion in the volume.