About us

I’m Frank Cranmer. I’m a Quaker who used to be an Anglican and I’m a graduate of the Cardiff LLM course in canon law, for which I now teach the occasional session. I edit the government & parliament and synod sections of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal and I’m casenotes editor of Law & Justice. I’m also the Secretary of the Churches’ Legislation Advisory Service, the primary purpose of which is to keep the Churches informed of what is going on in the secular policy sphere and to let Government know the Churches’ views on legislation and policy proposals that might affect them. My principal academic interests are church-state relations, religion and human rights and Presbyterian church law – the last of these simply because very few others seem interested in it (for reasons I can’t understand).

When I first became interested in the interaction between law and religion in the mid-90s it was still the pursuit of a fairly small academic community; but in the past four or five years the number of people researching and writing in the field has mushroomed – possibly as a reaction to the increasing political profile of arguments over the place of religion within society generally.

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I’m David Pocklington, an Anglo-Catholic and chorister at John Betjeman’s former parish in rural Oxfordshire.  A relative newcomer to this area of law, I became aware of some of the more practical issues through my column Industry Soundings which appears in Environmental Law and Management.  At that time I was involved in representing industry interests primarily in relation to resource management and climate change.

Recent attendance at the Cardiff LLM course provided a broader appreciation of the legislation associated with religion, and whilst my interests remain with public policy issues, they now include the dynamics of the involvement of faith groups in the development and application of new legislation, particularly in relation to the environment.

We are both Fellows at the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff, which is where we learned our trade.