First published in 1993 in association with the Stair Memorial Encyclopaedia, Kenneth Reid's The Law of Property in Scotland has long been regarded as a foundational text in Scots law. The appearance of a new edition more than thirty years after the first is thus a major event.
The new edition charts the tumultuous changes in the law of property, and especially in land law, which have taken place since 1993. These include the abolition of feudal tenure in 2004; the reform and restatement of the law of real burdens and the law of the tenement by the Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004; the replacement of the Land Registration (Scotland) Act 1979 by the Land Registration etc (Scotland) Act 2012; and the programme of land reform which has produced the Land Reform (Scotland) Acts of 2003 and 2016 and which continues today. The law of incorporeal moveable property too has been transformed by the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Act 2023, which came into force on 1 April 2025.
Yet, while much has changed, the fundamental principles of the law of property - principles which apply to property of all types, moveable and immoveable, corporeal and incorporeal - remain largely intact. To those principles, and to their practical working out in the detail of the modern law, the new edition of Reid on Property Law provides an authoritative and indispensable guide.
