Independence, the law of Scotland, or of southern Scotland, was closely akin to English law. That it had been less Romanized than English law had been is highly probable: no Bracton had set it in order.... Romanism must come sooner or later; the later it comes the stronger it will be, for it will have gone half-way to meet the mediæval facts." We find, accordingly, that, later and stronger, the Roman law did come. After the War of Independence, Scottish lawyers borrowed little from England, and, gradually, important differences began to emerge. Mr. Hill Burton has pointed out that the statement, frequently made, that the civil law is part of the law of Scotland, "can only be true of those portions which have from time to time been incorporated with it." The selection of these portions and their local adaptation formed part of the work of the Judicial Committee of the Estates. No attempt was made to codify Scots law for forty years after the Judicial Committee had been constituted as the Court of Session, but, in 1574, a commission was appointed to investigate into the condition of the law and to report on what they considered "meet and convenient to be statute."[7] The source of such additions as those made in accordance with this enactment was the Roman law, and the result has been to produce many discrepancies between Scots and English judicial institutions. The distinction between law and equity, for example, so important in England, is unknown to Scots law, for there never arose in Scotland a separate series of courts to administer a common law differing from the Roman civil law. The fact that the College of Justice was, in theory, a Committee of the Estates, has produced some interesting results. The idea of appeal was unknown in Scotland, or almost so. The records of the Privy Council show that the acts of the Court of Session were sometimes rendered null and void by the Council,[8] but the Council in no way exercised an appellate jurisdiction. In the reign of Charles II, an attempt was made to create the Estates into a Court of Appeal from the College of Justice, and it failed, for the technical and historical reason that the Parliament had already delegated its powers to the Senators. At the Revolution, the Claim of Right demanded the introduction of some process of appeal, but the Union negotiations did not deal with the question, and when, about 1711, in a case between the Presbytery of Edinburgh and an episcopal clergyman, the House of Lords heard an appeal from the Court of Session, they afforded the first instance of an appellate jurisdiction in Scottish causes. It is another consequence of the parliamentary origin of the Courts of Law that the High Court of Justiciary still possesses authority "competently to punish (with the exception of life and limb) every act which is obviously of a criminal nature, though it be such which in times past has never been the subject of prosecution."[9] The English courts have no