On 11 and 12 March, an international and interdisciplinary conference was held at Cardiff Law School to mark the tenth anniversary of the foundation of its Centre for Law and Religion. Eleven professors, all of whom are leading scholars with international reputations in this field, addressed the changing understandings of the family in international law, state law and religious law. The papers given provided a clear illustration of the vast array of areas in which law, religion and the family interplay and affect each other through the application of the law, such as legislative developments concerning same-sex relationships, biomedicine and religious reservations, and developments that illustrate a changing understanding of what constitutes a family.

On 9 January 2008, Dr Evan Harris, MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, brought forward the following new clause to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill: ‘The offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel are abolished’. His proposal had wide cross-party support and had also attracted backing from the House of Lords in the persons of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, and the former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harris of Pentregarth.

The Ninth Colloquium of Anglican and Roman Catholic Canon Lawyers took place from 3 to 6 April 2008, at Bishop's House, Sliema, Malta, and the meeting was graciously hosted by the Anglican contingent. The ten participants (five Anglican and five Roman Catholic) were: on the Anglican side, Norman Doe (Chair), Bishop Paul Colton, Mark Hill, Anthony Jeremy (all from the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff Law School) and Stephen Slack (Director of Legal Services at the Archbishops' Council, Church of England); and, on the Roman Catholic side, James Conn, Michael Hilbert, Aidan McGrath (all from the Faculty of Canon Law at the Pontifical Gregorian University), Robert Ombres (Procurator General of the Dominicans) and Fintan Gavin.

The eighteenth annual meeting of the European Consortium for Church and State Research took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, in November 2007, the only divided capital city in the world. It was devoted to the question of how national courts respect and apply the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), particularly Article 9, in their jurisprudence. The conference gathered representatives of 26 European Union States (all except Malta) and was hosted by Mr Achilles Emilianides of the Cyprus Institute for Church and State Research. The conference was inaugurated in a ceremonial way, by the President of the Republic of Cyprus, the President of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and the President of the European Consortium, Professor S. Berlingó from Messina.

As part of its tenth anniversary celebrations, the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University has established the Interfaith Legal Adviser Network (ILAN), the first of its kind in the UK. The Network seeks to facilitate an ongoing discussion, providing members with a greater understanding of their respective religious legal systems and the common legal issues they face. The inaugural meeting of the Network was held at Cardiff Law School on 7 December 2007.

On 2 May 2008, the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University launched LARSN – the Law and Religion Scholars Network. This initial meeting, chaired by Professor Norman Doe, Dr Javier García Oliva and Russell Sandberg, brought together nearly 30 scholars working in the area, and would have been attended by a further 21 had diaries permitted. The event began with participants briefly introducing themselves and their areas. This revealed not just the amount of scholarly activity being undertaken in law and religion but also the range of interests. Work was ongoing in areas as diverse as employment law, the law of death, criminal justice, Jewish law, human rights law and constitutional law. A variety of methodological approaches were also being taken, with doctrinal legal scholarship running alongside multidisciplinary work with religious studies, and socio-legal projects. Many of us worked as the sole academic focusing on law and religion issues in a law school, but there were also a number of clusters of scholars developing. As well as the established Centre at Cardiff – celebrating its tenth anniversary this year – research groups are developing at Bristol, Oxford Brookes and Canterbury.

On 8–9 July 2007 at Brecon Cathedral, members of the Centre for Law and Religion held an inaugural annual away day to review its work and plan long-term strategy ahead of the tenth anniversary of the Centre in 2008. The success of the LLM in Canon Law, the first degree of its type at a British university since the Reformation (set up in 1991 with the support of the Ecclesiastical Law Society), led those involved in that course and others at Cardiff Law School to recognise the need for a community of scholars dedicated to the study of law and religion. The Centre was established in the summer of 1998 to promote research and its dissemination in this field. It was established with the approval of the university and the encouragement of the Department of Religious and Theological Studies. Its activities are carried out in relation to the theory and practice of substantive law concerning religion, the focus being principally upon religious law (especially canon law) and national and international law affecting religion, with regard to their historical, theological, social, ecumenical and comparative contexts.