The procedures under which the Court operates are set out in its own Rules of the Scottish Land Court 1992.
You may download a copy of the Rules of Court in Portable Document Format (PDF). (31 pages, approx. 182 Kbytes.)
To view and print the document, you will need the Adobe reader. If you do not have the Adobe reader, it is available free for a range of operating systems from the Adobe web site. (Alternatively, if you are an X Windows user on UNIX, VMS, or OS/2, you might like Derek Noonburg’s free Xpdf PDF viewer.)
Practice Notes
In addition to its Rules, the Court has also issued a number of Practice Notes giving guidance to parties on how the Court deals with some specific types of application, notably resumptions. (“Resuming” is the process by which a landlord can, with the Court’s approval, take land from a croft or from common grazings, normally for development purposes.) The notes are available on this site as follows:
- Practice Note No. 1 offers general guidance relating to resumption applications.
- Practice Note No. 2 offers specific guidance relating to resumption of croft house sites.
- Practice Note No. 3 offers specific guidance relating to resumption of common grazings and the requirements for a Minute of Consent by the Grazings Committee.
- Practice Note No. 4 offers general guidance to Respondents on submitting Answers to resumption applications.
- Practice Note No. 5 offers specific guidance on the requirement for attachment of ground plans to Minutes of Consent and planning permission grants in resumption applications.
- Resumption — Common Grazings — Wind Farms (the text of a letter to solicitors from the Principal Clerk) offers specific guidance on how the Court will deal with applications for resumption of common grazings, where the purpose is to develop a wind farm.
Further information
You can find full details of the Rules and further information regarding the practice and procedure of the Scottish Land Court in Graham on the Scottish Land Court Practice and Procedure by Butterworths (ISBN 0 406 02981 4).
You can find further information on the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991, the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 2003, the Crofters (Scotland) Act 1993 and the Small Landholders Acts 1911 to 1932 in
- Law of Agricultural Holdings in Scotland by the Hon. Lord Gill
- Agricultural Law in Scotland by Agnew of Lochnaw
- Connell on the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Acts by Rennie and Agnew
- Crofting Law by MacCuish and Flyn
- Crofting Law by Agnew
- Law of Small Holdings in Scotland by Scott.
