On 29 December 1838, the Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Whittington Landon, died. In the months that followed, the cathedral chapter repeatedly refused to elect the individuals nominated by the Crown, setting the stage for a protracted struggle that would play out in Parliament and in the Court of Queen's Bench. This is the story of R v The President and Chapter of the Cathedral Church of St Peter in Exeter.1

The problem of relations between Church and state has existed from the very beginnings of Christianity and has evolved over centuries. The dominant model today is one of separation between the state and religious communities. In the context of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican City State remains the only exception to this principle. This article examines the tensions inherent in the way in which the Roman Pontiff, as head of the Vatican City State, exercises both religious and secular power, and how rule of law principles operate to constrain the operation of power as between the various organs of this state.

American schools are governed by a complex lattice work of federal, state, and local laws and regulations, many of them tailored specifically to primary, secondary, or higher education. But all schools are subject to the same First Amendment guarantee that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. This constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has produced a substantial body of case law. Nearly one-third of the United States Supreme Court's cases on religious freedom – 74 out of its 247 cases reported from 1815 to 20231 – have addressed issues of religion and education. All but six of these cases were decided after 1940, the year the Court first began to apply these guarantees to state and local governments alongside ‘Congress’;2 and for each Supreme Court case, there are scores of lower federal court and sometimes state court cases that add further nuance and amplification. This article summarises, and critically analyses, this ever-evolving jurisprudence.

In May 2021, Jesus College Cambridge submitted to the Diocese of Ely a ‘faculty petition’ – that is, a formal request to alter the fabric of an ecclesiastical building – asking for permission to remove from the west wall of the college chapel a large memorial to Tobias Rustat, ‘because of Rustat's known involvement in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans’. On 23 March 2022, following hearings the month before, Hodge Dep Ch provided a written judgment in which he denied the application. The college, he said, had not provided a convincing case that the removal of the monument was ‘necessary to enable the Chapel to play its proper role in providing a credible Christian ministry and witness to the College community’, and such a case was needed to outweigh the ‘considerable, or notable, harm’ that would result from the removal ‘to the significance of the Chapel as a building of special architectural or historic interest’.

On 6 December 2023, seven-year-old William Brown was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was retrieving his football from the road outside his home. A Year 3 pupil at St Eanswythe's Church of England Primary School in Folkestone, he had walked through the grounds of St Mary and St Eanswythe's Church every day on his way to school and had attended services there. His parents wanted to bury him in the churchyard, but although the Vicar was willing to conduct the burial, the churchyard had been closed by Order in Council in 1857 under the provisions of the Burial Act 1855, with only one exception being made for a burial in 1898. Because the churchyard had been closed, under section 1 of that Act his burial would require an Order of the Privy Council.

Enlightenment values were a necessary adjunct to, although not solely responsible for, the Western legal tradition. This is because the Enlightenment produced a lens through which human relations could be viewed, and this perspective strongly influenced the invention of law in the West.1 Eastern Orthodoxy developed its own philosophical system without reference to Enlightenment values. The East's failure to engage with those values has resulted in a failure to find a common ‘language’ through which East and West can speak to one another. This inability to speak a common language places the Orthodox Church at a distinct disadvantage in its relations with the West, and has done for a very long time.

On 22 May, standing outside the door of No. 10 in pouring rain (and for some unfathomable reason sans umbrella), the Prime Minister announced that there would be a General Election on 4 July and Parliament was duly prorogued on 24 May and dissolved on 30 May. Before that, however, there was a flurry of legislative business by agreement between the two front benches.

Pursuant to a 2013 faculty, the interior of this mediaeval church was painted in 2014. Instead of the specified limewash paint, the architect selected an alternative paint, which proved to be inappropriate: it was impermeable, damaging the wall fabric and causing the paint to flake off. Following a consistory court hearing in 2017 (reported at [2017] ECC SEI 6), the PCC was ordered to remove the paint, and repaint using the originally specified limewash, the cost to be borne by the architect.

During the course of a judgment in which the court granted a faculty for the introduction of a memorial outside the Churchyard Regulations, the court made the following observation concerning the legal basis of such Regulations:

The church has a growing reputation as a safe place for LGBTQIA+ people of faith. In September 2022 it received a gift of an altar frontal in the form of the Progress Pride flag, which had been removed following a complaint from outside the diocese; the present petition was for a faculty to authorise its introduction.

As part of a petition for a wider faculty, the court considered proposals concerning a font. The Saxon stone font had originally been in Old St Bartholemew's Church, Lower Sapey, which was now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. It was proposed to move it back to that church, because its location was said to limit the flexibility of the west end of the church and was a trip hazard. Its removal would cause serious harm to the significance of the church as a building of special architectural or historic interest.

Before the July 2022 amendment to the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules which removed a like-for-like replacement of an oil-fired boiler from List B, the PCC resolved on such a replacement for their church's defunct boiler. However, before the work was undertaken, the Rules were amended to require a faculty for such a replacement, and to require the Diocesan Advisory Committee to advise the court on whether the petitioners’ explanation of how they have had due regard to the Church Buildings Council's net zero guidance was adequate. While the petitioners had taken some steps to justify the decision they had taken by reference to the net-zero guidance, the DAC's pre-petition advice was that the petitioners’ explanation was not adequate, and the grant of a faculty was not recommended. Nevertheless, the petitioners issued the petition; but before the petition could be considered, and in the knowledge that such a course was unlawful, the petitioners procured the installation of the new boiler.

Mr Reid died in March 2023. He had been an avowed atheist all his life and was resolutely opposed to the practice of burial; but because he had lost touch with his family, those responsible for his funeral mistakenly arranged for him to be buried in the area of Bognor Regis Town Cemetery consecrated for the rites of the Church of England. When his family learned what had happened, they petitioned for a faculty for his exhumation.

Michaela School is avowedly secular and operates under a very disciplined regime. It has a high proportion of Muslim pupils, and in 2023 the school's governing body decided to prohibit pupils from performing prayer rituals on its premises – regardless of religion – after the Headteacher had banned prayer rituals as an interim measure. Muslims are required to pray five times a day; and while TTT, a Muslim, accepted that the requirements of the school day meant that she could not always pray during the appropriate period, she wanted to perform the midday prayer (Duhr) in autumn and winter during the school lunch break – which, she argued, was ‘free time’. It was argued for TTT that the school's refusal violated her rights under Article 9 ECHR (Ground 1); that the policy discriminated indirectly against Muslims, contrary to section 85(2)(d) and/or (f) of the Equality Act 2010 read with section 19 (Ground 2); and that in introducing the policy the school had failed to have ‘due regard’ to the need to eliminate discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to foster good relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, contrary to the public sector equality duty in section 149 of the 2010 Act (Ground 3). She also claimed to have been subject to two procedurally unfair ‘fixed terms of exclusion’ because she had not been allowed to respond to the allegations against her before her exclusions (Ground 4).