As part of trying to make sense of the year that just happened - teaching, writing, occasionally sleeping – I am starting here with some thoughts on my Law and Religion module. It was my first time teaching it, and like most firsts, it was equal parts thrilling, awkward, enlightening, and vaguely chaotic. But something happened when things clicked, and students cared; therefore, before it all blurs into next year’s to-do list, I wanted to write a little of it down.
I called the first unit “Law, Religion and the Backstory” because it sounded like something a person might actually want to read (or click, these days) on. The idea was that each unit would be “Law, Religion and…” something - “Law, Religion and Rights,” “Law, Religion and the Courts,” “Law, Religion and the Infinite Bureaucratic Machine” - but it turns out the backstory is complicated, and possibly cursed. I was trying to be clever, or at least less boring than “History of Law and Religion,” which feels like a one-way ticket to academic oblivion. I almost lost them anyway, these brave, curious, slightly terrified third-years, because what I thought was the narrative warm-up turned out to be more like the haunted woods at the edge of the story, where a bunch of people with powdered wigs and royal blood do confusing and occasionally violent things involving Acts of Supremacy and theological footnotes. I gave myself four lectures to get through this “backstory,” and by lecture two I was deep in the annals of the Church of England, trying to explain to a room full of future lawyers why Henry VIII mattered, why Thomas More was executed, and what the actual difference is between the Book of Common Prayer and, say, a statute. They stared. I talked about religious jurisdiction and royal prerogatives and ecclesiastical courts, and they stared harder. One student’s eyes glazed over so thoroughly I thought she might be slipping into a trance. But I get it: this wasn’t what they signed up for. They came expecting laws, cases, things with numbers and citations and a vague but comforting sense of logic. Instead they got the Tudors. Part of me still believes this was necessary - maybe not the pacing, maybe not all in the first fortnight, but the material was - the way religion and law have always been entangled, the mess of it, the way belief systems and legal systems have been interacting for centuries. The goal now, in hindsight, is to make that interaction visible and interesting, or at least coherent; to thread the story through the structure, not dump it at the start like a pile of dusty furniture. Because history is there, unavoidable and very much alive, whether we want to start with it or not. I just need to find a better way to tell it.
We made it through, though, somehow; and a huge part of why we didn’t all collectively sink into the ecclesiastical quicksand of Unit 1 is Peter, who taught Unit 2 (“Law, Religion and Human Rights”) and who has been doing this for years. He’s the kind of lecturer who walks into a room and immediately makes you feel like it’s all going to be fine, that law, and religion, and whatever mess they make together are all perfectly navigable if you just keep your head and pay attention to the right cases. Students perked up, sat up straighter, took notes, they may even have smiled, because Peter opened the windows. He started with Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which sounds heavy but actually isn’t - at least not the way he taught it. He gave them the basics of the Strasbourg human rights system, just enough to know where they were, and then zeroed in on what Article 9 really protects: freedom of thought, conscience, religion, belief, the whole deep human soup of it. And then came the clothes, or rather the cases about the clothes. Religious dress, headscarves, veils, symbols. Real people in real jobs trying to live real lives while expressing their faith, and the law – or at least the ECtHR - trying to decide if and when the state can say no. Dahlab, Sahin, SAS v France, students got the stories behind the names, the logic behind the rulings, and the bigger questions underneath it all. Then they hit Eweida, which is like a four-for-one deal. Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin were the ones who wore crosses and got in trouble for it; their cases were the first half of the lecture, and by then the students were all in, asking questions, comparing outcomes, figuring out why one case went one way and another didn’t. The second half took them into harder territory: Lillian Ladele and Gary McFarlane, both of whom refused to provide certain services because of their religious beliefs - civil partnerships in one case, sex therapy in the other. Now the rights were clashing: freedom of religion versus freedom from discrimination, conscience versus public duty. It was difficult, but it was alive. And Peter wasn’t done: he threw in a quick exploration of blasphemy laws just to keep everyone on their toes, and then zoomed out to the international stage with Article 18 of the ICCPR. He didn’t go too deep, just enough to show how the European approach compares with the Human Rights Committee’s take on things, especially on religious dress.
I came back to teach the third unit - “Law, Religion and Society” – and, honestly, something shifted. The room felt different: I don’t want to say it was exactly electric, but people were awake, heads were up, eyes were making contact, there was even a kind of forward-leaning happening. Not everyone, of course, but enough to feel it. It wasn’t just me, though part of me thought: maybe I’ve improved? maybe I’m less terrifying or more coherent? But really, I think it was the content. This unit hit closer to home. It was about how religion fits into society - not history, not human rights in faraway courts, but society. The students’ society, their world. And once we started talking about how the law deals with actual religious groups - who gets recognised, who gets special treatment, who gets ignored - they were in. Properly in. We started with the Church of England, of course: it’s sitting there in the constitution like a leftover from another age, still established, still shaping how things work, but then we talked about everyone else - all the other religious groups that aren’t written into the bones of the state, and how they have to exist in a system that wasn’t really built with them in mind: registration, charity law, access to public space, equal treatment. Some students were surprised. Some nodded, like they’d suspected it all along. It was the kind of content that starts a quiet churn in people’s heads. The fourth lecture is where it got really good. The phrase was “necessary in a democratic society.” It sounds vague, right? Polite, even; but it’s loaded. It is the threshold for when a government is allowed to restrict one’s right to manifest their religion. Not whenever it wants, not just because it’s annoying or inconvenient or out of fashion: it has to be necessary. Not just useful, not just popular: “necessary in a democratic society” - which means a place that values pluralism, tolerance, and all the problematic, beautiful, contradictory stuff that comes with that. We looked at how the courts interpret this, and how they try to figure out when a government is doing something protective versus something oppressive. The students really leaned into this. One could see the gears turning, because now it wasn’t about just knowing the law - it was about how the law thinks, and what kind of society it’s trying to protect; and maybe that’s what landed with them: that the phrase isn’t just legal filler, but rather a reminder that democracy isn’t just majority rule, it’s also about making space for people to live, believe, express, object, dissent; that the law isn’t only about drawing lines: sometimes, it’s about holding space open. And when that came through - when they started to see the weight and meaning of a single line in Article 9 - one could feel the shift, like something clicked.
Unit 4 is where it all came together for me, for them, and for the course as a whole. The unit was called “Law, Religion and Culture”, which sounds wide and open and intellectual, and it was - but let’s be honest, it was mostly about religion in schools. And the students loved it - properly, viscerally, unironically loved it. The kind of love that made them start bending the next few lectures back toward education, even when the syllabus was trying to steer them elsewhere. We moved on to religious legalism and legal pluralism, and they found their way back to schools. Then to religion, rights and culture - again, schools. Uniform policies, faith-based curricula, opt-outs, assemblies, prayer spaces, you name it. They had stories, opinions, fire. It was like they ha all been waiting for this part, and now that we were here, they weren’t going to let it go. And it made sense: schools are where it all starts, where rights and beliefs and differences get negotiated, or sometimes ignored, or sometimes crushed. It’s the first courtroom most of us ever know, so of course they cared. But then came the last lecture, and I decided to take a risk: I brought them something strange and beautiful and heavy, an article by Andrea Stone called “On Monsters and Mercy”. I wasn’t sure what would happen: it’s not a simple piece. It’s layered and complex and brings in literary theory, monster theory, Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, and some pretty devastating takes on church-state law. The abstract alone is a ride: Stone argues that even though we pretend we live in a secular world, what we often have - especially in law - is something sneakier: not a clean separation between church and state, but a kind of quiet favouritism, a system that pretends to be neutral but actually hands power to certain groups and certain beliefs. And this, she says, limits who gets to belong, who feels safe, who feels like the law is for them, and builds walls and calls them protection. It was a stretch, I know. They’re undergrads. It could’ve gone sideways; but it didn’t. They rose to it, they read, they argued, and they even let it unsettle them, which is huge. That’s not something one can teach exactly - how to sit with discomfort, how to let it change you, but they did it. They let the weird and the literary and the legal all mix together, and they asked brilliant, brave questions. That’s when I knew they weren’t just students of law anymore: they were starting to become thinkers of law. And that’s something one doesn’t see every day.
This was the first run. Difficult in places, surprising in others. Some moments felt like flying, some like free-fall. But the students showed up, they thought hard, they asked questions I hadn’t prepared for - which, honestly, is the best kind of teaching - and I survived. More than that, I learned. I’ll sit with it all properly soon, write something fuller and more considered. For now, I can say that it worked - not perfectly, but enough to want to do it again.