Secondly, then, what is the jurisprudential place of this God in the underlying construct of Scots law?
To answer this I shall turn to the so-called Father of Scots Law – the institutional writer, James Dalrymple, Viscount of Stair. I refer to his seminal 1681 Institutions of the Law of Scotland, using the 1693 edition (Edinburgh & Glasgow Universities Press, 1981). Stairs position is uncompromising. His work opens by famously declaring the position of God as the source of law to be such as to make the absolute sovereign divine law (1.1.1). Stair looks to the law of Moses as the prime positive law of God (1.1.9). It is on this basis, for example, that he justifies the fact that: For the most part the heritage, and succession in the whole land-rights, belongs to the eldest son, as the stem and line of the family, and the parents are presumed to provide the rest of their children with competent portions; though by the law of nature the right of succession doth belong to all. And, even this positive law, altering the course of the law of nature, hath its example from the judicial law of God
