11 Feb y 1808

Homologation necessary

If it were possible to introduce into the Scottish judicatories the English forms of pleading the system of Scottish procedure might thereby be made to receive Jury Trial with its utilities and inconveniences exemplified in English practice, and at this same time this substantive branch of the law /rule of action/ might receive that imperfect degree of determinateness which by means of those forms it has acquired under English Law: and thus from its present barbarous /imperfect/ and abject state, it might be raised into the somewhat less imperfect and abject state, possessed by English Law.

Happily for Scotland this minute advance in the career of improvement is impossible. Two circumstances may be distinguished, either of them sufficient to render it so.

One is that the portion /in respect/ of substantive law involved as above in the English forms of pleading, is in a multitude of points altogether different from the correspondent portion of Scotch law: in many points inferior, in many others /in reasonableness and utility/ different without being superior.