The Halliday Report, Conveyancing Legislation and Practice, has been the immediate source of most of the radical changes in Scottish land law which have taken place in recent years. Not many twenty-year-olds can claim to have achieved so much by way of construction, destruction and reconstruction and for this tribute to the chairman of the committee which produced a report which has been so fertile in the creation of new law it is fitting to choose for discussion one of the important innovations to which it led. Variation and discharge of land obligations by a tribunal is one of these innovations but, although it is something new for Scots law, it has a long history in English law. The purpose of this paper is to see to what extent the report drew on existing legislation for its scheme, to look at the history of the English provisions and to consider how successfully the scheme of the report was translated into legislation. It is suggested that in some respects the translation was less successful than it might have been had there not been English legislation to copy. It also appears that the general difficulty of keeping Scottish and English legislation in step when the legislation has to apply within two different legal systems has been exacerbated in this instance by the fact that English law has itself been undergoing change.