One legal system, two legislatures: Scottish law-making after devolution

Devolution has meant that Scotland has gone from not having its own dedicated legislature, despite having its own legal system, to having two legislatures - the Scottish Parlaiment with law-making powers which extend across many aspects of Scottish life, including health, education, housing, land-use planning, agriculture, the environment and the general areas of civil and criminal law, and the Westminster Parliament, which as a sovereign Parliament retains the power to legislate across the whole range of reserved and devolved matters, but which the UK government has said will not normally legislate on devolved matters except with the consent of the Scottish Parliament. This chapter examines the separate Scottish and United Kingdom dimensions of post-devolution Scottish law-making. The major theme of the chapter is the extent to which the Scottish Parliament is different from Westminster. For the proponents of devolution it was crucial that the Scottish Parliament should not simply be the 'Scottish Westminster'. The other theme is the continuing importance of the Westminster contribution to the Scottish ststute book, in the devolved as well as the reserved areas, and hence the importance of the effective parliamentary scrutiny of Scottish provisions in Westminster Bills, at Holyrood as well as Westminster.