Thirteen years is a long period over which to summarize the activity of Law and Religion UK. Since we began blogging in 2012 there have been two UK Monarchs, four Popes, several archbishops and bishops, four UK General Elections – and a COVID pandemic. Along with these “big ticket” items, all of which have an impact of law and religion, together we have published over 4,000 posts on more routine issues – an average approaching one post per day.

As noted in an earlier blog, posts relating to Anglican and Roman Catholic ecclesiastical law and environmental issues tend to be produced by David, while Frank tends to concentrate on issues such as Scotland, employment law and human rights. However, there is no hard-and-fast division of labour: we frequently edit each other’s working drafts and the weekly round-up is always a joint effort, irrespective of whose name appears on the post. Overall, we each publish a similar number of posts, with guest authors contributing just under 5% of the total, although some of their post receive far greater than the average readership.

Blogging basics

Technical issues

Anyone managing a website will need to address the various technical issues associated with its maintenance and development publication of posts, which may involve working with their IT advisor and with the internet provider. Recently there have been some occasions on which the blog was unavailable, but these were fewer than in 2020 when we experienced two significant periods of downtime – three continuous weeks in October and almost two weeks in January/February – which were resolved by changing our internet provider. Nevertheless, thanks to John Lagrue, our IT adviser  and also to our readers for staying with us, much as they did in 2018 when it was necessary for subscribers to re-register as we instituted changes on the blog to enable it to become GDPR compliant.

Legal considerations 

Blogging in the UK is subject to a number of legal requirements relating to  general requirements including data protection, copyright and IP law, libel and defamation; there are also specific issues concerning third party content. Our T&C and General Conditions indicate that we will not publish comments that, in our opinion, are abusive, racist, homophobic, potentially defamatory or otherwise capable of offending the laws against hate speech – or common decency. Non-textual material appearing on Law and Religion UK is subject to the same conditions of copyright as other textual material; this extends to material that is accessible to sources such as Google Images that has been extracted from Law and Religion UK without explicit or implicit authorization. Our Privacy Statement is here.

Current awareness

The relative immediacy of our posts in relation to current events requires that we, like WS Gilbert’s Grand Inquisitor, are “always up to date”. Nevertheless, whilst such current awareness is important to the context of our posts, we only post on issues which have a “law” and “religion” content. i.e. we keep a watching brief on developments on a wide range of issues but not all of them are appropriate in for the blog. On the publication of breaking news, we tend to work on the principle that “it is better to be right than to be first”, and aim to use primary, citable sources wherever possible.

We are similarly prescriptive in relation to the acceptance of “Comments” submitted to the blog. We routinely reject anonymous submissions or those using a pseudonym – if people aren’t prepared to put their names to what they post, why should their comments be published?

Dynamics of blogging 

As authors and joint editors of L&RUK, we determine which current topics merit a standalone blog post or inclusion in the weekly roundup of current events. Once the “Publish” button is pressed, it is the turn of those in the blogosphere to respond – or not – and although we can disseminate the existence of a post through social media, matters are then out of our hands. Some posts achieve the anticipated degree of response, but not infrequently, we find there is unexpected, but substantial interest in a current or a past post. During October 2025, the post Preventing a lawful and decent burial attracted over 1,000 page reads, yet the post was published in November 2024 and concerned an earlier article (2016) prompted by a case in 2012. Other example are: the interest shown in April 2025 regarding the funeral arrangements for the “Moors Murderer” Ian Brady which was covered in a 2017 post.

Just as events surrounding COVID-19 skewed our “normal” sequence of reporting on L&RUK, so the publication of the Makin Report and its aftermath had an immediate and disproportionate impact effect on our posts. However, reports on this blog were restricted to solely “law and religion” issues and did not extend to the extensive discussion on social media and elsewhere.

Content

Contributors to an academic legal blog such as ours should be aware that amongst their readers, both present and future, may be others with far superior knowledge or insights on the content to their own. This is particularly important when preparing a post on a current/developing issue, the content of which may be at the limits of one’s “comfort zone”, as is almost inevitable with a blog with a wide remit such as ours. Hence, Frank’s description of blogging as “writing on the Graffiti Wall of Death” is particularly apt. We always try to use primary sources where possible, since they can be more readily referenced, but there will always be occasions on which “Homer nodded” and we get it wrong (or presses “Publish” in error).  We positively welcome corrections, and we always try to correct errors as soon as we are aware of them. This is explained in greater detail in “OK – first rule of blogging – do your research first”…

Another aspect of this issue was given by Dr Ed Peters, the world-acknowledged expert on Roman Catholic canon law, who wrote on his Facebook page:

“Sometimes I feel like a canary in a canonical coal mine. I do react strongly to some things others don’t even notice. Problem is, the poor canary is usually dead before others realize it’s maybe time to save some lives. Oh well, back in to the cage.”

However, it is not unknown for action to be taken or threatened by an individual, an organization or an individual as a result of the content of a blog post [1].

“Most-read” posts

We recently achieved the significant milestone of 3 million “page-views” [2], and this provided an opportunity to compare recent “most-read posts” with those reviewed earlier, and attempt to discern whether there has been a shift in readers’ interest on our coverage of events, itself reactive to reports in the public domain [3].

The Index to L&RUK posts includes links to those identified as the “most-read“, and is based upon statistics generated by WordPress [4]. A preliminary review of the topics covered was undertaken in July 2025 and reported Law and Religion UK – “Most-read posts” (I). This covered the period 1 August 2024 to 4 July 2025, and was followed by a second review in October 2025, Law and Religion UK – “Most-read posts” (II), (18 October 2025). This second review considered data for the years 2016, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 [5], and included a breakdown into countries and the referrers.

Analysis

The preliminary review indicated that based upon the “top ten” posts, there had been an apparent shift in interest in the period August 2024 to July 2025. Safeguarding issues featured in four of the top ten posts, reflecting the continuing interest in the involvement of the Church of England in this area over this period. Three of the “top ten” were guest posts, although the topics were not related to safeguarding [6]; nevertheless, they may give some encouragement to other potential guest authors, who may benefit from a quick turn-around/ wide dissemination of their views and analyses on aspects of law and religion.

The additional data on page-reads since 2016 indicates that the majority were from the UK, (ave. 85.85%), with a significant number from the United States, (ave. 8.09%), followed by a smaller proportion from Australia, Netherlands, France, Finland, (ave. 1.34%).

The majority of referrers reach the blog through Search Engines, (ave. 87.89%), with smaller numbers from Twitter/‘X’, (ave. 4.77%), Facebook, (ave. 2.95%), and Thinking Anglicans, (ave. 2.43%).

A changing interest in L&RUK’s coverage of “law” and “religion”?

The broad ambit of L&RUK and the issue-driven nature of its content makes an analysis based on the “most-read” posts in a given time-period a complex task. Whilst the “top ten” posts provide a convenient snapshot of interest in what readers deem to be the important issues of the day, these represent a relatively small part of the total number of page-views, which are spread over several hundred non-current posts [7]. This suggests that the blog is widely-used as a resource in addition to its current awareness role. Nevertheless, this remains firmly within its “law and religion” ambit.

In a 2021 post, we noted that the impact of COVID-19 had featured in a significant number of posts since the first confirmed cases in January 2020. UK. We posted rolling weekly updates of new legislation and guidance on coronavirus COVID-19, starting in August 2020 and ending on 21 August 2021. Nevertheless, the focus of the blog (and the interests of its readers) remained on core “law and religion” issues, and this was reflected in the statistics for all the twelve months during 2021 and 2022.

In both years there was the usual mix of posts of issues of general interest:  church bells and the law, churches as charities, and churchyard regulations;  more topical items such as the approaches of religion to vaccines, and changes to the registration of marriage; and the on-going interest in parochial fees. This has remained the general pattern since 2012 with a mix of popular posts between the standard religion/ church focussed topics and those relating to current affairs.

David and Frank

References

[1] In view of the associated confidentiality issues &c, there are few published reports on these.

[2] WordPress statistics indicated that we had achieved 3 million page-reads in early October 2025. However, it is likely that these include up to 10% of these are from “porn bots”.

[3] such as in the quieter periods when the courts are not sitting and Parliament is in recess.

[4] Daily; Last 7 days; Last 30 days; Month to date; Last 12 months; Year to date; Last 3 years; Custom Range. However, not included in our reviews are the non-specific statistics on general access to “Home Page/Archive” and “Recent Posts”.

[5] 2016, (26 December 2016); 2022, (22 December 2022); 2023, (30 December 2023); 2024, (1 January 2025); and 2025, (1 January 2025 to 10 September 2025).

[6] Alternative Anglican Ordinations: seven South African deacons; Wheat bread and fermented wine at Holy Communion? The origins of Canon B17; and A heckler’s veto on Christian street preaching.

[7] During the period 1 August 2024 to 4 July 2025, reviewed here, the “top ten” posts accounted for only ~12% of the total posts during this time period; the remaining 499 individual posts had an average readership of 335 page views.