Monday 20 October 2025 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Faculty of Law, B16
About
Speaker: Dot Reid (Professor of Private Law and Public Policy, University of Glasgow and Visiting Scholar, Robinson College, Cambridge)
Dot Reid has been based at the University of Glasgow since 2011, where she is currently Deputy Head of School and Subject Lead for Private Law. Her research focuses particularly on the policy drivers for private law, and she is currently conducting research commissioned by the Scottish Government that will inform the future reform of succession law. She advocates strongly for an evidence-based approach to law reform, even in traditionally doctrinal areas of private law. Her work engages with the social dimensions of inheritance and evolving concepts of kinship.
Scotland has been trying to reform the law of succession for over thirty years, and although minor technical changes have been made the substantive law remains as it has been since 1964. This seminar discusses why it has been so difficult to reform succession law and presents headline results of a recent public attitude survey about inheritance. The main obstacle to reform has been the difficulty for policymakers of adapting the rules of succession to suit modern families in their many different forms. In particular, should a second spouse or civil partner who is not the parent of the deceased’s children have the same inheritance rights as their first spouse who is also the mother or father of their children? And what about cohabiting partners? The public had surprisingly strong views on these questions, but perhaps not the answers the government was looking for. This seminar will highlight some of the complex policy questions raised by our survey and what values ought to underpin a modern law of inheritance, which are highly relevant to England and Wales and other jurisdictions as well as to Scotland.
This event is a hybrid event. If you are in Cambridge, please do join us in the Faculty. To attend online please register.