As executor for this book, I wish, on behalf of the Outhwaite family, and on my own account, to express gratitude to Professor Richard Helmholz, Ruth Wyatt Rosensen Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, for taking editorial charge of Brian Outhwaite's manuscript, and to Cambridge University Press for expediting its publication. My only contribution has been the index.

Brian and I were professional colleagues, relations by marriage, and close friends and travel companions – going back over forty years. I read his splendid Scandal in the Church shortly after it came out in 1998, Brian presenting it to me as ‘a diversion’. I later heard from him about his more general work on the English ecclesiastical courts. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, his labours on the volume, unsurprisingly, faltered; and, with a view to gaining some external encouragement in the new circumstances, he sent the incomplete manuscript to CUP in July 2004. The Press's reaction, based on two readers' reports, was broadly positive, but not conclusive. When Brian received a further, now terminal, prognosis in January 2005, I asked him whether he still had plans for the book. His reaction was entirely dismissive: partly through an urgent reordering of priorities, partly through a genuine modesty concerning the worth of his contribution. It was only in late March that, unprompted, he passed the typescript, with attendant correspondence, into my care.