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THE SCOTTISH LEGAL SYSTEM APPLIES ONLY to a population of some five million within the borders of Scotland. Its extension overseas to the Scottish settlements in Darien and Nova Scotia during the 17th Century was shortlived; and, as will be discussed in the context of Constitutional Law, after the Union of 1707, English law became the personal law of British settlers in the Commonwealth overseas. Like the law of Quebec, Louisiana, and South Africa, Scottish law does not fit easily into the familiar divisions frequently made by comparative lawyers between civil law and common law systems, or between code law and case law system. But for the Union with England, Scotland might well have codified at least her civil law in the early 19th Century, like those countries with which she had close affinities in legal thought. The Scottish institutional writers such as Stair, Bankton, Kames, Erskine, and Bell-who still are treated as weighty authorities-owed much of their inspiration to Roman doctrine; and had done for Scots law a comparable service to that done by Pothier and Domat for French law prior to the Napoleonic codification. The possibility of fixing the orientation of Scottish law by codification really passed when, during the 19th Century, many new legal situations common to both Scotland and England resulted in the development of a substantial amount of what was in effect British law. In this development Scottish and English solutions affected each other reciprocally, and separate general codification of law for one country only ceased to be a practical proposition. Though some chapters of Scottish law are founded on indigenous custom-as, for example, the rules as to "legal rights" which may be claimed in the estate of a deceased by a surviving spouse or children-the Scottish system has been largely developed by comparative jurisprudence, and has drawn its principles, its categories and its methods from different sources at different stages of its evolution. English law has superseded Roman law as the main source of comparative legal principles taken into account by Scottish lawyers when