Are the University of Cambridge and its colleges peculiars? The university has always claimed independence from episcopal authority for itself and its colleges. A struggle was resolved in 1434 by a tribunal set up by the Pope, in which the Prior of the monastery of Barnwell heard both sides and decided that the University and its colleges were to be exempt from the supervision of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the Bishop of Ely, in whose diocese the University was situated. This became known as the Barnwell Process. It established the University and it colleges as peculiars defined as having an Ordinary other than the diocesan bishop. Colleges founded later but before the Reformation claimed the same privileges. At the Reformation, the authority of the Pope was replaced by that of the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the privileges that the University and its colleges enjoyed continued to apply. Post-Reformation foundations of colleges tended to claim the same exemptions from episcopal jurisdiction, but without documented evidence. This article argues that the continued acceptance by the Bishop of Ely of the University and its colleges as extra-diocesan confirms them to be peculiars within the legal definition.

In the Parliamentary report for February to May I wrote that Lord Falconer's Assisted Dying Bill, reintroduced under the new ballot procedure for private Peers' bills, had little chance of becoming law in the current session. As it turned out, that judgment was a little premature, because Rob Marris came first in the Commons ballot for private Members' bills and decided to introduce an Assisted Dying (No 2) Bill in similar terms to Lord Falconer's. In the event, however, when his Bill had its second reading debate on 11 September – the first occasion on which the Commons had had an opportunity to debate the matter since 1997 – it was decisively defeated, by 330 votes to 118.

The taking of oaths of allegiance to the Crown has a long history pre-dating the Reformation. However, the shifting balance of power in the sixteenth century gave greater political weight to the taking of oaths, and developments in the monarchy were matched by developments in the oaths required of clerics. In the present day all clergy are required to take the Oath of Allegiance prior to ordination and on taking up clerical posts. Other office-holders in the church are also required to do so.

Details of complaints under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 are beginning to come into the public domain. In particular, they raise questions as to the appropriate penalties to be imposed on a respondent, although even more worrying may be the anecdotal misunderstanding among some of the clergy about the moral behaviour expected of them. In addition, procedural questions remain that are not addressed in the written determinations. Such questions include the proper interest in making, and the motive behind, a complaint; the admissibility of hearsay evidence to support a complaint; and episcopal intervention and the bishop's role in reaching his decision.

This article deals with the relation between God and the secular legal systems of Western liberal democracies. It provides a normative argument for the compatibility of God and secular legal reasoning. In our age, in which believing in God is no longer socially axiomatic and the right to religious freedom protects all kinds of theistic and non-theistic religious beliefs, creeds and first philosophies, it seems contrary to religious neutrality for secular legal systems to single out God. This article instead argues that, although God and religion are inextricably intertwined, they affect the legal system in different ways because they are ontologically different. God cannot be reduced to a mere component of theistic religion. A proper understanding of secularisation might call for keeping God outside the legal system but not for driving God out of the public sphere of democratic societies. Secular legal systems are not atheist legal systems; they are legal systems ‘without religion’ but not ‘without God’. Secularisation implies some degree of minimal recognition of God as a metalegal concept. The specific degree of recognition of God appropriate for any given political community depends on its cultural and communitarian identity and should be subject to the rules of democratic procedures and majorities. This is the metalegal God.

One of the main goals of the Second Vatican Council (the 50th anniversary of whose opening will be celebrated in 2012) was the unity of all Christians. Not least among its achievements was the fact that it launched the Catholic Church into the Ecumenical Movement and also paved the way for a global revision of the Church's Code of Canon Law. This article reflects from a Roman Catholic perspective on aspects to do with canon law and ecumenism. It does so in the light of the Council's teaching and reception. Conciliar hermeneutics and questions left open at the Council are considered. In conclusion, the author suggests that greater attention to the Church's charismatic principle and missionary mandate underlined at the Council offers wide scope for continuing exploration among Anglican and Roman Catholic canonists in the cause of unity.

On 21 April, Dominic Raab resigned as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, to be replaced by Alex Chalk KC. On 8 May, The Times reported that the Bill of Rights Bill was to be dropped and that the Ministry of Justice had told its reporters that the new Justice Secretary had been ‘looking carefully’ at the Bill, while another Government source had described the Bill as a ‘complete mess’.

Archbishop Dr Barry Morgan having retired, the presidential address at the April meeting was given by the Senior Bishop, the Rt Revd John Davies, Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, on behalf of all of the bishops of the Church, with the emphasis on evangelism – which set the tone for the rest of the Governing Body meeting.

This article explores the Law Commission's proposals on how and where people can get married in England and Wales as found in their ‘Getting Married’ Consultation Paper. It examines the extent to which the Commission's proposals will deal with or mitigate concerns expressed about two types of non-qualifying wedding ceremonies: ‘unregistered religious marriages’ where the couple undergo a religious ceremony that does not comply with the requirements of the Marriage Act 1949, and ‘non-religious marriages’ where the ceremony is conducted by celebrants representing a belief organisation (such as Humanists UK) or by independent celebrants and so is also outside the Marriage Act 1949 and not currently legally binding. The article largely welcomes the Commission's proposals but expresses concern about the proposed officiant system and how it defines belief organisation; the proposed changes to the law on validity; and the creation of a new criminal offence. The article develops these three points further and contends that, while a transformed weddings law could recognise non-religious marriages and reduce the number of unregistered religious marriages, the introduction of statutory cohabitation rights upon separation is needed to truly deal with concerns over unregistered religious marriages.

The first statutory reference to a Vicar General in Man appears in an Act of Tynwald (the ancient Manx Legislative Assembly and which stil exists and operates today as a modern and democratically elected body) namely section 3 of ‘a book of spiritual laws and customs of the Island’.

I hope that I shall have the sympathy of the Society in attempting to respond to a request to speak about the legal implications of a body which had no standing in canon, ecclesiastical, civil or common law. The Lambeth Conference was a gathering of persons individually invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to meet him for three weeks in the University of Kent at Canterbury. Finance for the meeting came from a number of corporate bodies but none of them had any control over what happened. The Archbishop had asked a number of persons to assist him in the organisation of the meeting but the ultimate control of it was in his hands, subject to the willingness of those who were there to fall in with what was proposed. During the last week of the meeting some seventy resolutions were passed, but none of them, with one possible exception, has any legal effect of any kind.

Mr Chairman, Vicar General, Worshipful Chancellors, ladies and gentlemen. This is the second time that I have been privileged to address this Society. Three years ago I spoke after a good dinner at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, when members' critical faculties had undoubtedly been dimmed by the College claret! It is quite a different thing to speak to you today on a dull Saturday in the solemn environs of Westminster Cathedral, especially as in 1987 I spoke as a diocesan bishop and today I speak as one of those living in what is euphemistically called “retirement”. It is a demanding way of life in which one lacks the resources and the defences long taken for granted, and of course, it is subject to the changes and chances of British Rail for which I profoundly apologise. I had an unscheduled bus journey of an hour and three quarters round the villages of my former diocese this morning.

If a person has been duly sworn as a witness in a judicial proceeding, he must answer any relevant question put to him. If he does not do so, he risks being held by the judge to be in contempt of court and punished by being imprisoned or fined. The fact that the witness finds it repugnant to his sense of honour to give an answer which will break a confidence reposed in him by someone else does not excuse him from his duty. The public interest in the disclosure of all matters relevant to a judicial proceeding is regarded as so important that it prevails over any considerations of private honour between individuals. It is simply no answer for a witness to say ‘I was told this in confidence by a person who trusted me to keep his confidence’. This general attitude of English law has obvious and unwelcome implications for clergymen. A priest or clergyman will in the course of his ministry often receive private information from members of his flock, which his priestly duty requires him to keep secret. He might well be obliged to choose between disregarding his priestly duty or suffering legal penalties, which may be severe. Moreover, the prospect of having to submit him to this invidious choice will be repugnant to the judge; and the fact of such a choice being put, and of the clergyman being sent to gaol for doing his duty, is bound to cause dismay in large sections of the public. The possibility of this conflict of church and state actually happening is extremely small, but the fact that it exists at all is dismaying to many persons.

This paper questions accounts of the English Reformation which, in line with sometimes unacknowledged Anglo-Catholic assumptions, present it as a mere clean-up operation, the creation of a reformed Catholicism which removed medieval excesses but left an essentially Catholic Church of England intact. It argues instead that the Elizabethan reformers intended to establish a Reformed Church which would be part of a Protestant international Church, emphatic in disowning its medieval inheritance and rejecting the religion of Catholic Europe, with formularies, preaching and styles of worship designed to signal and embody that rejection. But Anglican self-identity was never simply or unequivocally Protestant. Lay and clerical conservatives resisted the removal of the remains of the old religion, and vestiges of the Catholic past were embedded like flies in amber in the Prayer Book liturgy, in church buildings, and in the attitudes and memories of many of its Elizabethan personnel. By the early seventeenth century influential figures in the Church of England were seeking to distance themselves from European Protestantism, and instead to portray the Church of England as a conscious via media between Rome and Geneva. In the hands of the Laudians and their followers, this newer interpretation of the Reformation was to prove potent in reshaping the Church of England's self-understanding.