MARRIAGE IN SCOTLAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 March 1939, Page 9

MARRIAGE IN SCOTLAND

PROPOSALS FOR REFORM OF LAWS. Proposals for the reform of the Scots' marriage laws were recently outlined to a women's meeting in Edinburgh by the Lord Advocate, Mr T. M. Cooper, K.C.. M.P. They were designed, he said, to effect one of the most notable social reforms attempted in recent years. Marriage was the most important transaction known to the law; yet it was still possible in Scotland for this basic relationship to be created without prior notice or subsequent publication and without form or ceremony of any kind simply by the private interchange of consent. There was no other State in Christendom which tolerated similar laxity. But Scotland still clung tenaciously to medieval archaisms which excited the amused astonishment of observers in other lands and provided a perennial theme for the romantic school of novelists. Even if this remarkable state of the law were attended by no social evils, the position would not be creditable. Lives had been and could be ruined as a result of the uncertainty attending a contract which, above all others, ought to be certain beyond a peradventure. There was no valid reason why the I contracting of a legal marriage should any longer possess any of the characteristics of a lottery.