Leading Works in Law and Religion is a book about books. With it, Russell Sandberg provides compelling evidence that law and religion has been developing over the past quarter-century from an obscure niche into an interdisciplinary and increasingly prominent subdiscipline of law. As his introduction makes clear, however, it has not yet achieved full cohesion or recognition and remains in its adolescence. In a bid to further crystallise the discipline, this collection showcases some of the landmark contributions to the field as filtered through the minds of its contemporary leading lights.

Sylvie Bacquet opens with an appraisal of Kevin Boyle's contribution to Striking a Balance: hate speech, freedom of expression and non-discrimination (1992). She considers this overlooked work to be an inspiring and humane forerunner to much recent scholarship on this fraught subject. Boyle considered Church–State separation and freedom of expression to be preconditions for religious freedom. He was vehemently opposed to blasphemy laws and led the charge against those who wished to see The Satanic Verses outlawed and Salman Rushdie murdered. He was unsparing on attempts to sneak the de facto blasphemy laws into international law via the back door through such concepts as the ‘defamation of religion’, but supported measures against incitement to racial hatred. As this chapter makes clear, his legacy is significant, though his cause is far from won.

Anthony Bradney examines St John Robilliard's Religion and the Law (1984). He notes that Robilliard was concerned with the position of minority religious groups and was moved to write the first general and comprehensive monograph on this subject. More than a merely doctrinal treatise, Robilliard's work considered the impact of rules on those to which they applied and helped advance the law and society movement. Frank Cranmer looks to Scotland in his treatment of Francis Lyall's Of Presbyters and Kings (1980). He notes the work's rich contribution to legal history in its account of the interaction between religion and the Scottish state. Cranmer follows this with a chapter on the ‘living leading work’ that is the European Convention on Human Rights. He goes so far as to state that its domestic significance ‘cannot be overestimated’ (p 62), given that it has had an impact on areas far beyond those involving Article 9 and has supplanted the prior common-law, freedom-based approach.

Eoin Daly introduces Jean Bauberot's Republican Fundamentalism Against Laïcité (2006). He notes that this French work warns against increasingly illiberal interpretations of State secularism and argues that Bauberot's revisionary scholarship has become a rallying point for those looking to push back against the instrumentalisation of laïcité against Islam. Peter Edge and Lucy Vickers analyse Carolyn Evans’ Freedom of Religion under the European Convention on Human Rights (2011) and the theme of unresolvable tensions and pitfalls in attempts to protect religious freedom in Article 9 jurisprudence. On a similar note, Méadhbh McIvor's treatment of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) demonstrates the value of empirical ethnographic study and the questioning of whether the concept of religion warrants separate categorisation and distinct treatment from other social phenomena.

Ed Morgan's chapter centres on Harold Berman's justly famous Law and Revolution (1983). He acknowledges the importance of history to law and lauds Berman's considerable achievement in bringing to light the ‘DNA of the Western legal tradition’ (p 128) in such grand style, taking in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and common-law influences. Morgan is undoubtedly correct in noting that Berman's work has done much to historicise the relationship between law and belief and to underline the importance of religion in legal studies. Next, Megan Pearson discusses Lucy Vickers’ Religious Freedom, Religious Discrimination and the Workplace (2016). Addressing the specifics of religion in the workplace, this oft-cited monograph offers practical legal analysis rather than a sociological or theoretical account of the area. Pearson concludes that Vickers’ chief contribution lies in providing the first substantial treatment of this field and in outlining a framework based upon proportionality for deciding conflicts. David Pocklington considers Christopher Hill's A Note on the Theology of Burial in Relation to Some Contemporary Questions (2004) to be an important restatement of the principle of Christian burial in Church of England regulation.

Russell Sandberg's chapter on Frederic Maitland's Roman Canon Law in the Church of England (1898) emphasises the importance of legal historical analysis and the value inherent in studying the roots of Church of England law. Maitland was a renowned legal polymath whose judgments on all things legal history remain the benchmark for scholars more than a century after his death. Sandberg is undoubtedly justified in conscripting him in service of an argument in favour of greater intellectual curiosity and interdisciplinarity in the field of law and religion. Sharon Thompson and Russell Sandberg provide the final contribution to the collection with a piece on Ayelet Shachar's Multicultural Jurisdictions: cultural differences and women's rights (2001). Acknowledging Shachar's considerable positive influence on the ongoing debate over multiculturalism, the authors argue that she does not go far enough to ensure that internal minorities are satisfactorily protected from having to make choices constrained by culture and gender. They suggest that a critical feminist approach to law and religion can benefit the burgeoning field by disrupting disciplinary boundaries and providing worthwhile insights into the minorities-within-minorities problem.

John Witte Jr, in his afterword, notes that this is ‘a British Isles book’ and places it within the global currents of law and religion scholarship. Perhaps unsurprisingly, religious freedom and religion–State relations predominate, followed by the themes of human rights and family issues, religious legal systems, the religious heritage of secularism and the place of religious ethics and professionals in secular life. This book is an interesting overview of well-known and lesser-known works falling within the general ambit of law and religion. As with all such collections, some of the selections are rather niche and of limited interest to the non-specialist, whereas others, accompanied by insightful commentary, provide useful introductions to, or reacquaint the seasoned reader with, the classics. It also makes a convincing case that the field of law and religion has a great deal of undeveloped potential in legal education, which will only be realised with open-minded curiosity and interdisciplinarity.