Scots Law Case Study

Scots Law

The Scots law has its basis brought up from Roman law, that includes uncodifed civil law and common law with medieval sources. Scots law is the legal system of Scotland. The Scots law has two types of courts responsible for justice; criminal and civil. The supreme civil court is the Court of Session, also, certain civil appeals can be moved to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The High Court of Justiciary is the supreme criminal court in Scotland. Apart from these, the Sheriff Court is the main civil and criminal court that hear most of the cases. There roughly are about 49 Sheriff Courts in the country. Also, the District Courts had been introduced in 1975 for very minor and small claims.

ANSWER (A)

The Law of Agency

Here, it is certain that Maya had been acting with the usual authority of someone in her position as an agent.

Here, the judge could not have applied ostensible authority (it is the power of an agent to lawfully bind its principal with a third party) because It requires that the principal has to be aware of what is happening, but here, the principal was undisclosed.

It is open to the principal to ratify an unauthorized agreement that the agent has entered into. But for the ratification of a contract, the existence of the principal has to be bound but here in this case, it cannot be inferred as the principal had remained undisclosed.

Besides the above, agency of necessity also could not be applied as Maya Stork has not made any attempt to contact Kallesi McTavish, or taken any actions that were in favour of the principal. Also, it is improbable that the court would object to purchasing shower gels and shampoos as it is a commercial necessity of the hotel.

Below are two case studies that link to the above

The manager Humble, used to place orders to Watteau even when he had been restricted to do so. Later when Watteau discovered that he was not being paid, he eventually sued Fenwick. This is because the principal is liable for all the acts of his agent, even when the agent acts outside his limits of his actual authority.

• Freeman & Lockyer v Buckhurst Park Properties Ltd (1964) 2 QB 480

One Karpoor was a property developer, who formed a company with an other party to carry out a development. He had acted as if he was the managing director, with acquiescence of the other directors. He had created a contract with a company of architects to carry our certain work related to his property development. Here, the architects were not paid and they sued the company. The debt had to be bound by the company. Even when Karpoor had no actual authority to enter the contracts on his own self, he had an ostensible authority that he had to look towards to as well.

The cases above address the liability of an undisclosed principal.

International Business Publications (2012) Scotland Business Law Handbook [online]. Available from: