The death has been announced of James Mackay, Lord Mackay of Clashfern KT at the age of 99. After a distinguished beginning as a mathematician he returned to Edinburgh to read Law, was called to the Scots bar in 1955 and took silk in 1965. In an illustrious legal career he was successively Sheriff Principal for Renfrew and Argyll, Vice-Dean, then Dean, of the Faculty of Advocates, and Lord Advocate. He was appointed a Senator of the College of Justice in 1984 and a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1985. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher appointed him, a serving Law Lord, as Lord Chancellor, in which position he served for ten years. He retired from the House of Lords in 2022.

Lord Mackay was a devout member and elder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which has traditionally banned its members from attending Roman Catholic services. In the mid-1980s, however, he attended requiem masses for two of his judicial colleagues, Lord Russell of Killowen and Lord Wheatley, and he was summoned to a meeting of synod to explain himself. He denied that he had broken the Church’s prohibition, explaining that he had attended purely to pay his respects to his dead colleagues; however, the synod suspended him from the eldership and barred him from communion for six months. In 1989 it met again to review the decision, but he refused to give any undertaking not to do the same in future should the occasion arise, and he later withdrew from the Church.

The result was a split in the Free Presbyterian Church that led to the establishment of the Associated Presbyterian Churches by those who felt that the FPC did not give sufficient weight to freedom of conscience as set out in the Westminster Confession of Faith: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any way contrary to His Word; or beside it, if matters of faith or worship”. 

Lord Mackay will be remembered as a great reforming Lord Chancellor, inter alia introducing the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, which ended the Bar’s monopoly on audience in the higher courts, “no win, no fee” litigation, and the reforms that ended fault-based divorce.

There are obituaries in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and  Scottish Legal News,