It is not unfair to describe this book as an extended apology. The author sets out to consider why the study of law and religion is not flourishing in England and Wales. He offers us an account of the rapid rise of ‘law and religion studies’ from the close of the last century onwards, notes its current stagnation, and confesses that,

That distinction is, of course, Sandberg’s own, developed in his earlier book, Law and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2011). But if he wishes to blame himself and his earlier scholarly assumptions for the failure of the field to flourish, he also now wishes to make amends. He therefore offers us a reimagining of the subject – quite literally at times, as the book is interspersed with brief fanciful dialogues set in alternative futures – along lines suggested by critical gender and race theories, informed also by potential interdisciplinary parallels with law and history, and law and geography. The third main part of the book considers the value of Luhmann’s social systems theory in understanding the relationship between law and religion, now arguing that it needs a critical corrective which is mindful of the ‘entropic complexity’ of modern society. Finally, we arrive at Sandberg’s proposed improved approach to law and religion:

In his closing pages he brings his grand tour of methodological reflections down to earth in a summary account of what he would now do differently were he writing that first book again. In brief, it would have been much more clearly informed by critical interdisciplinarity and as a result more aware of its own limited perspective and reach.

There is much to applaud in these proposals for a widening of scholarly perspective, even if the ‘autoethnographic’ elements of personal intellectual narrative come across a little self-indulgently at times. But Sandberg’s underlying argument left me with several questions and, perhaps, an underlying disagreement over the place and nature of doctrinal legal scholarship in the academy. Sandberg takes the view that he and I were doing similar things in our books: determining the existence and limits of ‘law and religion’ as a field of study (p 38). Of his own work, he states that it ‘was intended to help increase the number of university courses on the topic, establishing it as a legal sub-discipline like sports law or even family law’ (p 39). But there is an important difference between defining a field of study and constructing a body of legal doctrine. My task in The Law of Organized Religions (2010) was quite different: to break out of the doctrinal and scholarly stranglehold exercised by Anglican ecclesiastical law on one hand, and individual rights to freedom of religion and non-discrimination on the other, in an attempt to gather together the various ways in which the social phenomenon of organised religion is engaged and impacted by English law. It was a reconstructive, bottom-up exercise that deliberately refused to assume a fixed definition of what counted as religion, or indeed settled boundaries of its scope, let alone claim that this defined a discrete field of ‘law and religion studies’. Of course, there was an agenda: that any reasonably just liberal democracy needs to have a body of laws which relate to religious groups generically. I tried to do that in a way which was sensitive to both the contingencies of history and widely accepted convictions of political principle. I particularly wished to draw attention to the significance of religious dissent for the shaping of contemporary law. If the work was informed by a ‘narrative of progress’ (p 209), then only to the extent that I believed, and still believe, that religious belief and practice are fundamentally collective in nature, and that religious liberty is vastly preferable to persecution and discrimination. Doctrinal reconstruction is not possible without taking some normative stance.

A case can be made that this reconstruction of legal doctrine – by which I mean the intellectual and practical exercise of rendering as coherent and justifiable as possible the public scheme by which human behaviour is authoritatively interpreted, evaluated and shaped – lies at the heart of the academic legal endeavour. Such an approach is not uncritical, nor does it exclude the multiplicity of other perspectives which can and should be brought to bear on legal doctrine and practice, but the latter is not simply there to be read off the page. Legal doctrine is not simply a compendium of positive legal materials. It has to be constructed first in the light of an inescapable obligation of legitimate governance, and if it is not, there is nothing for the multiplicity of other perspectives to engage with. This is what I had assumed Sandberg’s earlier work was more or less doing – not making an implausibly grand claim for a field-determining definition of its subject matter, a claim which he himself disavowed at the time (Law and Religion, p 7).

But perhaps the most problematic claim of this book is that the faltering progress of ‘law and religion studies’ in the United Kingdom is a result of too narrow an emphasis on religion as law. We are helpfully reminded of John Witte, Jr’s interdisciplinary approach which pays as much attention to ‘law as religion – reading legal practices through the lens of religion’ as it does to ‘religion as law – understanding religion legally’ (pp 87–88). But I wonder if Sandberg does not underestimate the extent to which this literature already exists – it is just not within the purview of most legal academic teaching and writing. Islamic studies, contemporary political sociology and Christian political theology are just three rich examples of alternative disciplinary lenses through which law is viewed. A more systematic survey of writing which addresses law from the perspective of other disciplines would have exposed this wealth of material. The fact that these interconnections are more evident in some US Law Schools may have more to do with higher general levels of religiosity and a much stronger tradition of philanthropic support of universities, than with a supposed absence of relevant literature. After all, those same Law Schools also embrace a scholarly preoccupation with doctrinal questions arising from the religion clauses of their constitution against which the British literature on religious human rights and non-discrimination pales into insignificance.

In short, for all my sympathies with Sandberg’s catholic interdisciplinarity and desire to strengthen research in our field of common interest, we should neither lose sight of the core tasks of legal scholarship, nor expect too much of the modern Law School, which has to find a way of engaging a vast mass of legal materials through a wide range of possible methodologies and perspectives. In this context, a retrospective on British law and religion studies over the last 25 years – including Sandberg’s own important contributions – need not be quite as bleak.