Previous studies of archdeacons in this Journal defended their pastoral hearts in a ministry dominated by law. This article sees the archdeacon's pastoral and priestly ministry as created and enabled by law. It looks at the canonical description of the archdeacon's office before turning to the work of an archdeacon in such areas as visitations, parish and diocesan governance, faculty jurisdiction, care and discipline of clergy, conflict resolution and creative innovation. The article draws on relevant legislative instruments, including Acts, Measures and Codes of Practice; on case law; and on quasi-legislation such as diocesan handbooks. Its conclusions are based not only upon what is set down in these, but also upon what archdeacons actually do. Archdeacons across the Church of England and the Church in Wales, and a Channel Islands dean, responded to a short survey looking at archdeacons’ work in relation to the stipulations of the law. The article concludes that archdeacons occupy a pivotal position in dioceses, both because of what the law requires and because of what it does not prohibit. They play a key role in shaping the church and its ministry. With bishops and others, they delight in its beauty and rejoice in its well-being.

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

This article focuses on the role of private patronage within the Church of England. Private patrons own advowsons. These property rights can no longer be traded but may still be bequeathed or transferred without value. When there is a vacancy in a benefice, a patron has the right to nominate a new incumbent in accordance with the Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986. This article uses contemporary and historical records to define private patronage and analyse the current role of the four broad categories of private patrons: private individuals, educational bodies, guilds and patronage societies. While acknowledging the benefits that patronage can bring, this article advocates substantive reform for the future including a sunset rule for private individual patronage. The article suggests that reform of the law of private patronage will make a positive contribution to other contemporary issues before the Church by promoting diversity in vocations, facilitating necessary pastoral reorganisation and adding to the dialogue about the future of the parish system.

The Convocations of Canterbury and York are of ancient origin and bring together clergy in a deliberative and legislative body. The convocations have been reformed at various points in their existence, notably in the Reformation and during twentieth-century reforms of Church government. While they have waxed and waned in terms of importance and influence, the two convocations remain important components of the complex system of government of the Church of England.

Women's ordination raised issues of conscience across church traditions. The Church of England's statutory legal framework prevented these issues being confined to the Church; they were also played out in parliamentary debate. The interface between law and conscience has, however, considerable historical and contemporary resonance, as well as sound theological pedigree. This article therefore considers the place of conscience in legal and philosophical thought before the Enlightenment. It looks at norms of conscience in Roman Catholic and Church of England liturgical use. On a broader canvas, it looks at the interplay between thought, conscience and religion in human rights case law. The article suggests that a consensus of thought which sees the dictates of conscience as founded in, and inseparable from, the teachings of religion begins to break down in the early seventeenth century. Yet human rights courts find themselves deciding cases of conscience or religion where conscience and religion are often intertwined and where the external manifestation of one is governed by the inner promptings of the other. Such difficulties are not limited to the human rights courts but also play out in debates pertaining to ordination. While the North American churches sought to deal with issues of conscience head on, the Church of England very carefully avoided the language of conscience in its early discussions of women's ordination, conscious, it seems, of a lack of consensus around its meaning and source. As the women's ordination debates developed, arguments of conscience were often deployed more by those opposed to the move than those who supported it. Conscience became as much the locus of pain caused by another's action as it was an inner faculty for self-guidance. Its valence shifted from an intellectual to an emotional category.

Some scholars, faced with the apparent conflict between the Church of England's teaching on marriage and the idea of equal marriage embraced by the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, have focused on the implications of that Act for the constitutional relationship between Church, State and nation. More frequently, noting the position of the Church of England under that Act, academics have critiqued the legislation as an exercise in balancing competing human rights. This article by contrast, leaving behind a tendency to treat religion as a monolithic ‘other’, and leaving behind the neat binaries of rights-based analyses, interrogates the internal agonies of the Church of England as it has striven to negotiate an institutional response to the secular legalisation of same-sex marriage. It explores the struggles of the Church to do so in a manner which holds in balance a wide array of doctrinal positions and the demands of mission, pastoral care and the continued apostolic identity of the Church of England.

The process of Church–State separation began 90 years before the 1919 Enabling Act, which gave the Church Assembly legislative powers. The Assembly was conceived not by William Temple's Life and Liberty movement but by aristocratic Conservative politicians, motivated by practical efficiency and High Church principles. With Church lawyers, they dominated it for 40 years. The Church's response to Parliament's rejection of the 1928 Prayer Book, to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 and, in the 1950s, to the impossibility of fully articulating in the Church of England's canon law its doctrine on marriage discipline and the seal of the confessional, was united, confident and defiant. The Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 largely completed efforts to achieve legislative autonomy without disestablishment. The General Synod era has seen changes in both Church and State. The traditions that eclipsed the Church's former ‘Centre-High’ consensus have been less concerned to underline the Church's distinctive identity and doctrines, about which the Synod has been less united. Among MPs, Conservative High Churchmanship and concern for minorities have waned, while expectation that the Church's practice will reflect contemporary social attitudes has increased, placing the long-term survival of the 1919 settlement in question.

The Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man is an important member of the Legislative Council, the second chamber of the Manx Tynwald. The shape of Tynwald has changed considerably since the mid-nineteenth century, and there have been frequent reviews of the place of ecclesiastical officers in it. The most recent debates illuminate this form of religious representation, but in particular show the importance of ecclesiastical structures – and the contingent status of the Diocese of Sodor and Man – in the lord bishop retaining a vote, as well as a voice, in the principal organ of governance in the Isle of Man. This article argues that a more critical approach is needed in weighing the ecclesiastical structure argument against other constitutional arguments around the constitutional position of the lord bishop.

In recent years, the wearing of Islamic dress in public spaces and elsewhere has generated widespread controversy all over Europe. The wearing of the hijab and other Islamic veils has been the subject of adjudication before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on many occasions. The most recent case before the ECtHR as to the prohibition on wearing the hijab is Lachiri v Belgium. In this case, the ECtHR held that a prohibition on wearing the hijab in the courtroom constitutes an infringement of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantees the right to freedom of religion or belief. From the perspective of religious freedom, the ruling of the Strasbourg Court in Lachiri is very significant for many reasons. The purpose of this comment is critically to analyse the ECtHR's decision in Lachiri from the standpoint of religious liberty.

Liberal modernity and its associated individualism have created conditions in which a case for an established Church appears to contradict all the principles of social diversity. But the characteristic mechanisms of liberal modernity for managing difference – the ballot and the market – have proved inadequate to prevent social divisions from deepening, as the national argument about Brexit demonstrates. Despite the Church of England's lack of a confident narrative of establishment and the tendency to evaluate establishment on pragmatic grounds, this article proposes that a robust theological defence of establishment can be made in terms of both Anglican ecclesiology and a theology of power and authority in which the highest sources of authority are those with the least power. Whether the Church of England is able to regain confidence in such a theology of establishment and rise to the challenge of generating a unifying national narrative of identity post-Brexit, is left as an open question.

Members of the Church of England are part of an ordered Church with a given liturgy. That order is deeply embedded in our story and today all clergy and lay ministers function and carry out their ministries on the authorisation of the bishop of the diocese. The Church of England is an institution which has its rules, laws and codes of conduct. Because we have no doctrinal formulations of our own, the liturgy in the Church of England expresses much of our theology. While there have been many changes in liturgy, a given liturgy, or a liturgical structure within which certain texts are prescribed, is part of how we are.

This journal has published two distinguished series on the lives and careers of individual jurists in the history of English church law, from the mediaeval period to the late nineteenth century: one by Professor Sir John Baker on ‘famous English canonists’ (1988–1997); and the other by Professor Richard Helmholz on ‘notable ecclesiastical lawyers’ (2013–2017). Most prepared for their professional careers with the study of civil law at Oxford or Cambridge (and before the Reformation also of canon law). Many practised as judges, advocates and proctors in the church courts (until statute ended much of their jurisdiction in the 1850s). Some wrote treatises on church law. A small number were also priests, but less so as the centuries unfolded. While these professional canonists and civilians may have had a monopoly in practising church law, they did not have a monopoly in thinking or writing about it. The clergy, who never trained or practised as lawyers, also had things to say about church law. But the clerical profession has been somewhat neglected by scholarship as a class contributing to the history of church law and jurisprudence. From diocesan bishops through parish priests to clerical scholars in the universities, their books, pamphlets, sermons, letters and other materials often deal with the nature, sources and subjects of church law. Their aims vary: from the educational through the historical or theological to the practical and polemical. These priest-jurists – fathers-in-law, they might quip – contributed much to the intellectual development of church law. One is Robert Owen, a Welsh scholar cleric whose books include Institutes of Canon Law (1884). No scholar has to date unveiled Owen as a notable Anglican priest-jurist – strangely, he has been lost to scholarship as among those whom he himself chided as ‘eminent Canonists’ who ‘hide themselves’ and remain ‘veiled Prophets’.

On 22 January 2019, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe agreed the text of Resolution 2253: Sharia, the Cairo Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Resolution begins – on an uncontroversial note – by reiterating ‘the obligation on member States to protect the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion as enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights … which represents one of the foundations of a democratic society’. It then goes on, however, to recall that the Assembly ‘has on several occasions underlined its support for the principle of the separation of State and religion, as one of the pillars of a democratic society’. This statement is not entirely non-contentious: it ignores the situation in several Member States of the Council of Europe and is based more on notions of laÿcitÕ than on the observable facts in countries such as England, Denmark, Finland and Norway that have state Churches. Unfortunately, this simplification and confusion set the tone for what is to follow.

I am grateful to the Society for the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Enabling Act and the beginning of the Church Assembly with some reflection on an often ignored but highly valuable feature of that inauguration: the Single Transferable Vote or STV. I tried on one respected registrar recently an illustration of what the task must be like for those who do not welcome it. Was it, I suggested, like a blind person doing a jigsaw where the pieces were all shaped differently from each other – in other words, where the blind person could ensure that it was put together accurately, but on the other hand never saw the picture? The response was that that picture reflected accurately how it had in fact felt to that registrar. That might suggest that this lecture should be explaining and commending STV as general good practice, but in the event the process and virtues of STV have here to be largely taken for granted. I offer here one short commendation of STV.

The International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS) chose Rio de Janeiro and the sun-kissed beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana for its fifth conference and, unsurprisingly, the event was heavily over-subscribed. ICLARS was founded in 2007 with the aim of providing a forum where information, data and opinions could be readily exchanged among members and made available to the broader scientific community. Its first conference was held in Milan in 2009, followed by meetings in Chile in 2011, the USA in 2013 and Oxford in 2016. The proceedings from all these conferences have been published, giving permanence and a wider readership to the innovative scholarship which these gatherings have consistently produced.

HM Land Registry has published an updated Practice Guide on the property aspects of converting a charitable trust into a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (‘CIO’). Church of England parishes cannot convert themselves into CIOs, but congregations in some smaller denominations have either done so already or are contemplating conversion.