At first glance, it appeared to be a technical and dry decision about the operation of the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855, yet the Supreme Court judgment in R (on the Application of Hodkin) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages was actually one of the most significant decisions related to law and religion in 2013. The Justices of the Supreme Court held that a church within the Church of Scientology could be a ‘place of meeting for religious worship’ within section 2 of the 1855 Act. In so doing, the Supreme Court overruled one of the most well-known decisions in English religion law, R v Registrar General, ex parte Segerdal. In Segerdal, although the Court of Appeal had held that a chapel within the Church of Scientology could not be registered under the Act, the reasoning of their Lordships differed: Buckley LJ and Winn LJ focused on what they perceived to be the lack of ‘worship’, refusing to define the ‘chameleon word’ religion, while Lord Denning emphasised the phrase ‘religious worship’, holding that this required ‘reverence or veneration of God or a Supreme Being’ and that this was not met in the case of the Church of Scientology, which was ‘more a philosophy on the existence of man or of life than a religion’. All of these statements have been questioned by the bold Supreme Court judgment in Hodkin, which provides guidance on how the terms ‘religion’ and ‘religious worship’ are to be understood by English law in the twenty-first century.

Whatever may be thought about the question of the possible disestablishment of the Church of England, there is one premise which the protagonists do not dispute. Nobody doubts that the Church of England is established. Well informed persons also know that, as one aspect of struggling with ‘the Irish question’ in the nineteenth century, the union of the Churches of England and Ireland was dissolved, and the Church disestablished, so far as the island of Ireland was concerned, by the Irish Church Act 1869. Besides, there was disestablishment for the territory of Wales and Monmouthshire by the Welsh Church Act 1914, an Act which is something of a constitutional curiosity: as there is not a separate Welsh legal system, it is very rare for legislation to distinguish between English and Welsh territory, as that Act does.

Concerns about legal pluralism, the co-existence of more than one legal system within a state, have become pronounced in recent years, owing to fears about the operation of sharia law in Western societies. At the same time, the concept of legal pluralism has become ubiquitous within legal literature. Paradoxically, the concept is both politically controversial and academically banal. This article contends that a major failing of the concept of legal pluralism has been the inability to distinguish legal norms from other forms of social control. It is suggested that this failure can be overcome by developing the concept of a ‘legal order’ as found in the work of Maleiha Malik and the understanding of law as discourse in the work of the German theorists Niklas Luhmann and Robert Alexy. It is argued that developing these approaches provides a means by which legal norms can be distinguished without adopting either a wholly objective or a completely subjective approach and without focusing exclusively upon the legal norms generated by the state.

Religious offences in Italy, as in many European countries, have a long and complex history that is intertwined with the events in the history of the relationship between church and state and the institutional and constitutional framework of a nation.

This article is divided into three parts. The first part aims to offer some historical remarks concerning the rules on the contempt of religion and blasphemy in Italian criminal law from the end of the 19th century to the present day. The second part focuses on changes to the law on vilification introduced in 2006 and the third part deals with the recent developments in blasphemy law in the context of sport.

The article shows that, on the one hand, reforms of the offences grouped under vilification of religion are anachronistic and do not stand up against the religious freedom of individuals, yet on the other, despite the traditional rules for the protection of religion being considered obsolete, they are applied in new areas of law, for example sport, and are used to curb bad manners and bad behaviour. The relationship between the new functions of these criminal rules and the traditional ones, however, remains uncertain and fluctuating, and reveals a moralistic approach to religious offences.

In 1974, the province of Alberta began to issue drivers' licences with photographs of the licence holder but exempted persons who objected to having their photographs taken for religious reasons from the photograph requirement. At that time the Muslim population of Canada was tiny and it was an unspoken assumption that the exemption was created for the Hutterian Brethren who have long had a number of colonies throughout the Prairies. In 2003, the province made photographs mandatory for all licence holders and created a provincial facial recognition data bank for the photographs. The Wilson colony of Hutterites objected to having their photographs taken on the ground that photographs constitute an infringement of the second commandment concerning idols (Exodus 20.4) as they understand it. Without drivers' licences, the colony is unable to make off colony trips to take their produce to market, or their ill members for medical treatment, or to be volunteer firefighters in their surrounding area, that is, the absence of licensed drivers makes it much more difficult for them to sustain their largely self-sufficient agrarian communal way of life which is also a matter of belief (Acts 2.44) without the expense of hiring taxis or outside drivers on an as-needed basis. The province offered a compromise that Hutterite drivers be issued with photograph-free licences but that photographs would still be required for the data base. The colony suggested a photograph-free licence bearing the words, ‘Not to be used for identification purposes’. Neither side accepted the other's proposal and the colony initiated litigation on the ground that the freedom of religion of the Hutterites pursuant to section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the ‘Charter’) had been infringed. The colony succeeded at trial and by a 2–1 decision in the Alberta Court of Appeal but lost in a 4–3 decision in the Supreme Court of Canada because in the view of the majority, written by McLachlin CJC, the photograph requirement was a ‘reasonable limit’ on religious freedom and ‘demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society’ under section 1 of the Charter.

A panel of experts has produced a Statement of Principles of Christian Law, drawn from an examination of their internal regulatory instruments. These principles are offered for further examination by comparative scholars of church law, as an expression of shared ecclesiology, and in furtherance of the ecumenical endeavour.

In the last decade, the religious dimensions and significance of the European Union have been increasingly recognised. This paper sets out the role and regulation of religious associations within European law. Although it is often assumed that European competence does not touch on matters of religion, a jurisdictional separation of ‘economics’ and ‘religion’ has been increasingly hard to sustain. European law grants various privileges and exemptions to religious bodies. However, the dominant model to emerge is one of pluralism: distinctive substantive legal regimes applicable to religious bodies, and a distinctive participatory position within the governance of the European Union. However, the paper suggests that the pursuit of pluralism has not been entirely successful National diversity in this field coupled with the sheer complexity of achieving a reasonable balance of competing interests conspire to make it remarkably elusive. What is needed is a greater recognition of the right of States to adjust European legal requirements to accommodate the legitimate needs of the religious bodies within their jurisdiction and a renewed commitment to producing workable solutions in dialogue with religious associations.

The right of patronage has for many centuries played a most significant role in the life of the English Church. In many ways it is a remarkable concept. What could be more spiritual than the right to present a clerk who is to have the care of the souls of a parish to the bishop for admission and institution? Yet from around the twelfth century this right has been regarded in England as a piece of secular property, and disputes concerning this right cognisable in the common-law courts. Coke tells us that it is an ‘incorporeall inheritance’, or, to use a more modern term, an ‘incorporeal hereditament’, which is real property capable of devolving to heirs on intestacy and yet takes no tangible form: an invisible right which gives substantial power to those who possess it.

Most clerics of the Church in Wales will be aware that many people on the fringe of Church life will describe themselves as belonging to the Church of England, rather than as members of the Church in Wales. A Welsh hospital chaplain recently issued a circular requesting that Anglican patients entering hospital should describe themselves as members of the Church in Wales rather than of the Church in England. Seventy and more years after the disestablishment of the Church in Wales there is thus confusion in the minds of many about the identity of the Church in Wales. Is it, or is it not, part of the Church of England? But if there is confusion in the minds of some about the identity of the Church in Wales, there is equal confusion about its status. What does it mean to belong to a disestablished Church? What does it mean to be a disestablished Church?

The implementation of Article 17(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) has always been one of the central topics of discussion for legal scholars analysing the relationships between religious groups and European institutions. According to Article 17, the European Union shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with churches, religious associations or communities, philosophical organisations and non-confessional organisations. In the case in hand, the complainant, the European Humanist Federation (EHF) decided to lodge a complaint before the European Ombudsman when the European Commission rejected the proposal for a dialogue seminar.

It is widely recognised that the process of secularisation takes place differently in different parts of the world. Less often appreciated is the wide variety of ‘secularities’ (and indeed of ‘secularisms’) that emerge as a result. This article will look at this question systematically, and will try to identify at least some of the factors that must be taken into account if we are to understand unbelief as well as belief. In so doing it builds on the author's earlier work relating to patterns of religion in modern Europe.1

In the aftermath of the tragedies in the United States on 11 September 2001, the news media in the United Kingdom reported a great increase in crime and attacks on Muslims. A Director of the Central Mosque spoke publicly of the unprecedented backlash against the British Muslim community and whilst emphasising Islam to be a religion of peace and opposed to terrorism, urgently stressed the need for greater protection. The police chiefs were responsive. The government had to act.

Legislators have normally exercised one of two options when enacting hate crime legislation. They either provide for punishment of ordinary criminal acts to be enhanced when the offence has been committed by reason of prejudice or hatred towards the victim, or they pass an Act which establishes an entirely new substantive offence. The United Kingdom Parliament adopted the first approach under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, initially with regard to racially aggravated crimes and later in respect of religiously aggravated offences. In passing the Race and Religious Hatred Acts 2006, Parliament has taken the second approach and created a new substantive law. This paper considers the specific requirements that will need to be satisfied in order to establish the offence and some issues that arise in relation to proof of intention, relevance of motive and the nature of the language required to constitute hatred, in the light of the concession to freedom of speech contained in the statute.

The Church of Sweden, being the national Lutheran Church, was disestablished in 2000 and former state obligations were transferred to the church. Major changes were effected in the oversight of the clergy and all complaints were thereafter to be handled by the church itself. This article considers empirical data concerning those complaints and makes an evaluative comparison with the previous system.