Richard Hooker's book, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is much more than a museum piece or a dissertation on how to run churches. It is a classic of doctrinal reflection, and is topically relevant. His main opponents at the time belonged to the militant Puritan wing of the English Church, and in answering them Hooker provides a still-rich line of thought. Theologically speaking, the most basic sense of law, for Hooker, is God's acceptance of the logic of a limited creation. A crucial concept is ‘compatible variety’, and this should be kept in mind when reading Hooker on the laws of nature, the laws of society, and the law that regulates the Church. Also of importance is the distinction between the unchangeable basics, in Church or state, and those laws that contribute to the maintenance of this or that particular society or Christian community. For Hooker, the mistake of his Puritan opponents was to think that the Bible is an exhaustive source of laws of both kinds. The Bible is neither a complete nor an incomplete law book. Law, as the form of compatible variety, is also the form in which God's ‘abundance’ is to be perceived and experienced. Outside the abiding truths about the sort of life God's life is and the dignity given to creatures, human intelligence and ingenuity and prudence have a wide remit. According to Hooker, the most basic rebellion is to refuse the limits that make compatible variety possible. Law assumes, then, that we do not ‘begin socially as a set of unrelated atoms, whether individuals, classes, races or interest groups. Our basic position is one of potential agents in a negotiation through which we discover our welfare, and discover something we do not know at the start. Key theological notions are creation and the Body of Christ.

In this paper, the authors present different views of the legal implications of Percy v Church of Scotland Board of National Mission, in which the House of Lords reversed the Court of Session and held that a former minister could sue the Church under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and, contrary to previous views, probably had an enforceable contract for services. Cranmer describes the basis for the decision and suggests that it represents a realistic view of the employment status of clergy. Peterson is less optimistic about the decisions legal and practical effects and argues that it undermines the constitutional status of the Church of Scotland as well as overall prospects for religious freedom in Scotland.

The subject of the sixth meeting of the Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers in Rome 2005 was the Roman Catholic position that Anglican orders are invalid. The meeting employed a canonical framework to explore the status and terms of Apostolicae curae (1896) and the modern applicability of the canonical issues of intent, matter, form, and minister to the question of Anglican orders. The meeting did not examine pneumatological aspects of ordination. This article seeks to set alongside each other the ritual elements of the liturgy for the ordination of priests in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in their respective canonical contexts. It proposes the value of a pneumatological approach for possible Roman Catholic recognition of the vitality of Anglican orders. A draft of this paper was presented to the seventh meeting of the Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers in Johannesburg in February 2006, where it was favourably received.

Judges need guidance if they are to apply the law in particular circumstances with an even hand. For Roman Catholics, Canon 19 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law provides this guidance by reference to the practice of the Roman Curia and by the constant opinion of learned authors. Useful as these supplementary sources are, they mean that judges have to trust that those responsible for making decisions in the Roman Curia and the learned authors have drawn their conclusions on a sound basis. This study considers what happened when a specific document was misunderstood in the Roman Catholic Church for almost four hundred years. The document, a letter from Pope Sixtus V to his Nuncio in Spain in 1587, responded to a specific query concerning the capacity for marriage of men who had been castrated. The interpretation of the letter defined the Roman Catholic Church's concept of marriage in general and its understanding of the impediment of impotence for four centuries. In the twentieth century, several Roman Catholic judges and canonists refused to take at face value the conclusions offered by other judges and learned authors, and decided to carry out their own analysis of the document in question. This resulted in a complete reversal of the way in which marriage cases were considered by the Apostolic Tribunal of the Roman Rota, and contributed to the emergence of a much richer and more integrated theology of marriage.

The church electoral roll performs a number of important functions within the Church of England, yet the qualifications for enrolment as set out in the Church Representation Rules, and the basis on which a person's name may be removed from the roll, are far from clear. This article considers critically the criteria for enrolment (especially the meaning of ‘habitual’ attendance at public worship), the duties of the electoral roll officer, and the rights of appeal against his decisions. It concludes by drawing attention to the requirement for every parish to prepare a new roll in 2007.

The legal revolution brought about by the Human Rights Act 1998 has affected arcane legal areas such as the law of exhumation, by questioning whether refusal to grant an application to exhume and move a dead body would breach the applicant's human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). While the Consistory Courts have been quick to develop arguments based on human rights, the majority of the European Court of Human Rights in its recent judgment in Dödsbo v Sweden showed a greater reluctance to do so, emphasising the fact that although the refusal to exhume may interfere with the applicant's human rights, such an interference could be valid under the terms of the ECHR.

On 27 October 2005 the House of Lords' decision in Fraser v Canterbury Diocesan Board of Finance (No 2)—referred to in this Comment as Fraser (No 2)—ended an audacious attempt by the Canterbury Diocese to eliminate the issue of reverter in the majority of school sites affected by it. The media, largely unable to comprehend the legal issues, announced that the decision would lose the Church a lot of money: ‘The widespread practice of selling school sites could prove to be a costly mistake’; ‘Defeat over sale of school land to cost Church millions’.

A recent article in this Journal by Professor Norman Doe explained the background to, and desirability of, an Anglican covenant, given the present contested issues of theology and discipline. This article examines how such a covenant might be dealt with in Australia.

Recent years have witnessed a piecemeal development of discrimination law that affects religious organisations: the collection includes statutes such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976, statutory instruments such as the Employment Equality Regulations 2003 and 2005, and international human rights instruments such as Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The newest addition to the collection is the Equality Act 2006 (c 3), which received Royal Assent on 16 February 2006.

Mediation is becoming widely used as an alternative means of resolving disputes that have hitherto been decided in court or by arbitration. Mediation typically involves the appointment of a third party neutral who works with the parties to explore with them how they can consensually resolve their dispute. Hallmarks of the process are (1) confidentiality, both in relation to communications between the mediator and each party and in relation to the judge or arbitrator who will hear the case if mediation is unsuccessful, and (2) the mediator's role as a facilitator of a negotiated agreement rather than an evaluator of the likely prospects of success of the parties.