On 13 January 1794, Maurice Margarot of the London Corresponding Society stood before the bar at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh charged with the crime of sedition. Margarot was one of the very few English delegates who had been present at the so-called British Convention, organised by the Scottish branch of the radical society the Friends of the People, and held in Edinburgh in November and the beginning of December 1793. Together with his fellow Englishman Joseph Gerrald, and William Skirving of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, Margarot had taken on a leading role at the Convention. It was for this that he had been put on trial. In the opening stages of the trial, Margarot presented a challenge to the judges and the prosecution which initiated a discussion about sedition as a crime under Scots law both in his trial and those of other Convention delegates. Margarot stated:

In the trial, Margarot's challenge was understood to raise a question: which statute under Scots law made sedition a crime in Scotland? Margarot's focus was thus on written law, and his view seemed to be that if no such statute could be produced, then sedition should not be accepted as a crime in Scotland and the case would have to be abandoned. Certainly, when seen from the point of view of an Englishman such as Margarot, the situation in Scotland must have appeared rather odd. Whereas English law provided for the possibility of charging a defendant with ‘seditious libel’, it had been made clear by the time of Margarot's trial that there was no statute under Scots law which used the term ‘sedition’.