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A fan died after the Raith Rovers game. Timing marked his age.

The real stand-out stat for me there is the Goals Against column. Doolan's Thistle has been drastically better at keeping it tight at the back than any of the other teams this season.

Which facts do you think he has failed to give due relevance to? I don't think, against any legal standard, the decision is completely absurd. What matters is whether he reasonably believes that it modifies the law so as to have an adverse effect on reserved law. The issue here is that whether an effect is "adverse" is in the eye of the beholder.

Bad faith is astonishingly difficult to prove to the legal standard.

There are entire books written on intensity of scrutiny and reasonableness/rationality review. This isn't (really) the Clapham omnibus test. That's the legal test about whether "the reasonable person" would reach a particular point of view or do a particular thing. This is essentially a Wednesbury unreasonableness situation. The court will ask whether Alister Jack's grounds for believing the statutory test was met was within the range of responses someone in his position could plausibly have arrived at without taking leave of their senses, taking/failing to take into account relevant/irrelevant considerations, or reaching a decision manifestly in bad faith.

Knowing what is meant legally by reasonableness, it clears the hurdle. As a matter of reasonableness in ordinary parlance: it's riddled with contradictions and reads largely like arguments come up with after the fact to justify a policy position already held.

An occupational hazard. I would say that, when you read the statement of reasons, it's very hard to conceive of what concessions could be made that would leave any meaningful bill in place to be passed. That is the strongest suit that the Scottish Government has to the effect that the reasons for vetoing the Bill aren't genuinely "section 35 ones".

Short answer: yes Slightly longer answer: the neutrality or otherwise of courts can be measured against potentially myriad axes. The UK Supreme Court is a neutral court by any party political standard, but the culture and outlook of courts can change with personnel and political context (especially on the appropriate intensity of judicial review). Robert Reed's court is vanishingly unlikely to adopt an anxious scrutiny of political questions. Brenda Hale's might have been marginally more interested. I think this case would have failed with even the most favourable UK Supreme Court bench, and I suspect it will fail (if not referred directly) in both the Outer and Inner Houses of the Court of Session anyway. That is the real reason this case will take 18 months to a couple of years to resolve, I suspect. It's not immediately obvious that Schedule 6 can be used to fast-track it to the Supreme Court (my gut is there's an arguable case it can, but they won't want to encourage routinely skipping the Scottish courts).

I'm not a civil servant.

This case has (IMO) poor prospects of success. This is not a comment on the policy merits of: (a) the Bill (b) the Governor General's veto and statement of reasons It is an observation rooted in the extraordinarily wide drafting of section 35. The legal standard of "reasonable belief" as to an "adverse effect" on the law "as it applies to" reserved matters is pretty much a slam dunk for the UK Government, because it is a very low bar. It is easy to substantiate even if you think Alister Jack is a moron who doesn't understand the Bill. The problem is that what is permissible under the Scotland Act is considerably wider than what is constitutionally responsible or sensible. This should have been resolved through a combination of (a) political concessions on both sides and (b) section 104 orders (to mitigate some of the cross-border issues). But what we're really in is Sewel territory: something that relies on political actors respecting the spirit of something. The courts aren't equipped to resolve this in a way that protects devolution.

I must have imagined the Article 50 case, the prorogation case, the Welsh Local Government Byelaws case and the Welsh Agriculture Bill case, then.

I will settle for nothing less than Dundee as a concept being tried before the Hague for being a war crime.

Nothing less than the carpet bombing of Dundee and the surrounding perimeter is morally warranted.