Love over Parliament House

Prolific author and medical law professor Alexander McCall Smith was called to the Scots Bar on 26 March 2010.

Despite rumours that Professor McCall Smith intended to supplement his meagre royalties with appearances in bail appeals, it emerged that he had been called on a non-practising basis.

A search of the McCall Smith ouevre for references to the Faculty of Advocates drew little apart from chapter 25 of The World According to Bertie (Polygon, 2007), where an un-named advocate "with fine, rather aquiline features" has a rather worrying consultation with Angus Lordie in the case against Angus' gold-toothed dog Cyril on a charge of biting a child in Dundonald Street, Edinburgh.  While Cyril is eventually found not guilty, this owes everything to the intervention of Bertie (aged 6) and nothing to the advice or forensic skills of counsel.  Perhaps the omission will be rectified in forthcoming episodes of 44 Scotland Street.

The Faculty of Advocates website reminds Scots Law News that the Professor is not the first member of his family to be called to the bar: in 1951 Anne McCall Smith, a relative, was one of the first women to be admitted to the Faculty (Scots Law News thinks possibly the third).

[Photograph courtesy of Karin Sohlgren, Stockholm]