In October 1993, I had to decide whether it was proper for me, as an unbeliever, to go to Parliament to vote in favour of a Church of England measure. Was it proper that laymen, not members of the church, not involved in the decisions taken, should be allowed to sit in Parliament to decide what the law of the church should be? After some discussion, I was persuaded it was proper, and cast my vote accordingly. In that decision, I recognized the triumph of one version of the Royal Supremacy over another. It is the triumph of Christopher St. German over Bishop Stephen Gardiner, of Sir Francis Knollys over Queen Elizabeth I, of Chief Justice Coke over Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and of John Pym over Archbishop Laud. That triumph took a century to arrive after Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and, like many other triumphs, it threw out a promising baby with its mess of popish bath-water.

In May 1932 the House of Lords delivered its judgement in the case about the presumed snail in the ginger beer bottle with which even non-lawyers are familiar, Donoghue v Stevenson. One of the five judges, Lord Atkin, formulated what has become known as the neighbour test in this way:

The Lambeth Commission (2004) proposed a number of short-term and long-term solutions to issues raised by recent and highly controversial developments in the Episcopal Church (USA) and the diocese of New Westminster (Canada). From these events have emerged important questions about the nature of communion between, and the autonomy of, each of the forty-four member churches of the Anglican Communion, and the way in which decisions of common concern are made. In order to consolidate this communion, as a long-term project, the Commission proposes the adoption of an Anglican Covenant by all forty-four churches of the Communion. This article describes the terms of the proposed Covenant and identifies their provenance, in order to establish that the proposal is for the most part a restatement of classical Anglicanism. Only in serious cases of disagreement which substantially risk the unity of the Communion is the proposal innovative. The article also describes briefly reactions to and possible implementation of the proposed Covenant.

The Terrorism Act 2000 recognises that religion may be a force for bad in its definition of ‘terrorism’: ‘The use or threat of action … designed to influence a government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public … for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.’ ‘Radicalisation’ is the process by which an individual becomes involved in terrorism, and it is the statutory Prevent Duty, introduced under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, that is the UK's current means of tackling radicalisation. Under the duty, specified authorities (such as schools, police, etc) must have due regard to preventing people from being ‘drawn into terrorism’. This article addresses an often-neglected area in the ongoing legal debate surrounding the statutory Prevent Duty: the religious dimension. It suggests that religion is at the centre of the Prevent Duty and that the formulation of the duty was stimulated by religion – namely, Islamist extremism and radicalisation. It will discuss the ways in which the Prevent Duty can be criticised; that it has an impact on human rights that it is potentially discriminatory towards Muslims; and that it does not clearly distinguish between permissible radical religion and impermissible harmful religion. The article concludes by suggesting that religion plays an important part in the understanding of extremism and radicalisation.

In recent years, those involved in regulating, forming or advising faith communities have had much to contend with: the expansion of the vicarious liability doctrine, the status of ministers of religion and the decision in Shergill v Khaira, not to mention the General Data Protection Regulation. These issues share a common denominator: they require faith communities to give close consideration to the values which they seek to articulate and foster in the expression of their own autonomy and right of self-determination. That is, they serve as a prompt to reconnect with the intellectus and vinculo iuris of their own ecclesial norms. This article is intended to encourage such an exercise and to contribute to a discussion of the potential points of collaboration between the civil law and faith communities in securing dispute resolution by which ecclesial values may be accommodated.

This study explores juridical aspects of the ecclesiology presented in the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission Paper, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (2013). It does so in the context of systems of church law, order and polity in eight church families worldwide: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Reformed, Presbyterian and Baptist. Common Vision does not explicitly consider church law, order and polity or its role in ecumenism. However, many themes treated in Common Vision surface in church regulatory systems. This study examines how these instruments articulate the ecclesiology found in Common Vision (which as such, de facto, offers juridical as well as theological principles), translate these into norms of conduct and, in turn, generate unity in common action across the church families. Juridical similarities indicate that the churches share common principles and that their existence suggests the category ‘Christian law’. While dogmas may divide the churches of global Christianity, the profound similarities between their norms of conduct reveal that the laws of the faithful, whatever their various denominational affiliations, link Christians through common forms of action. For this reason, comparative church law should have a greater profile in ecumenism today.1

This article presents an anthropological account of the European Court of Human Rights' approach to material religion. Focusing on a range of cases involving an alleged violation of Article 9 – the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – in relation to such diverse religious objects as cassette players, incense, crucifixes, photographs and cross necklaces, it draws on ethnographic studies of material culture to suggest a disconnect between the Court's emphasis on religion as belief and the lived experience of embodied, sensual and object-oriented religious practice. It concludes that Article 9's privileging of the forum internum over material practice has contributed to an immaterial view of religion and religious life. Such an understanding ultimately fails to appreciate the importance of objects in the creation, expression and maintenance of religious worlds.

During the earlier part of 1993 a paper of mine was published in the Ecclesiastical Law Journal. Entitled ‘What of the Church in Wales?’, it endeavoured to suggest why the disestablished Church in Wales still maintained the characteristics of an established Church. The paper seems to have aroused much interest within certain circles of the Church of England, especially among synod members, at a time when the question of disestablishment was once more being publicly aired. The point was made to me repeatedly that disestablishment would need to be accompanied by dis-endowment, although the only reason for this assertion appears to have been the historical precedents of the Irish and Welsh disestablishments. I am not competent to write about the former, but with regard to the latter I feel that a historical examination of the events which led to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales might raise some question marks against this assertion.