As the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly recognised, the ability of religious communities to structure themselves into religious organisations can be crucial to their exercise of both religious and associational rights. There are a variety of ways of legally structuring an organisation, even within a single European jurisdiction, but some of the most significant are those allowing the creation of legal persons. Such legal persons are even, in pan-European terms, capable of exercising religious rights.
The first of these important collections arose from the 17th European Consortium for Church and State Research Meeting, held in 2005. The core of the collection is 24 country reports, which form an excellent foundation for comparative consideration of the central issues. Four overarching chapters approach the issues from a regional perspective, with eastern central Europe, northern Europe, southern Europe and western Europe considered separately. These are accessible overviews, particularly that by Potz and Wieshaider on western Europe, but lack a detailed theoretical perspective. This reflects the emphasis of the collection as a whole, which is ‘to give an overview of the different legal ways in which churches and other religious organisations appear in various European countries’ (p vii).
On one level, the second of these collections is a dialogue between Anglican and Roman Catholic canon lawyers on the three issues of initiation, membership and authority, which are of particular significance to the two legal communities involved. On that level, it is clearly an important text, bringing together strong but accessible contributions from specialists in the two systems. It is, however, a wide-ranging and authoritative collection, dealing with an issue of more than purely internal significance. In areas as diverse as employment law and counter-terrorism proposals, religious organisations are powerful organisations, whose inner workings can become the subject of state scrutiny. Of particular interest to legal scholars working outside the two ecclesiastical legal systems will be the discussion of authority by Hanson.
