Marriage law and education law

Sandberg, Russell ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4310-9677 2024. Marriage law and education law. Duddington, John, ed. The Legal Legacy of the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Approaches to Law, Routledge, pp. 177-199. (10.4324/9780429264115-13)

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Abstract

When law and religion writers comment on marriage law and education law in England and Wales they typically present them as an example of what Charles Taylor has called ‘subtraction stories’: accounts of things that the historical churches used to do where their impact has been reduced over time. Such approaches are Christian-centric but also owe much to the pervasiveness of the secularisation thesis. This account adopts a chronological periodisation only to question it and to show the dissonance between the actual changes in education and marriage law and the prevalent secularisation narrative. It simultaneously maps the main developments in relation to both marriage and education law. This is itself innovative in that these two areas of law are often considered separately or as part of the broader history of church-state relations. In so doing, it demonstrates that the direction of travel has been far from linear, inevitable or irreversible. It presents the current law not as a stump of a once magnificent tree that has been chopped away at over time but rather as the product of historical quirk based on grubby compromises and an unwillingness if not downright refusal to consider comprehensive reform. This recasts the debate as to reform. Seeing the present law as being the often accidental consequence of tweaks that were politically possible at particular times, rather than as some received wisdom passed down and ‘improved’ as societies advanced, makes the need for reform not only more compelling but also means that such reform could and should be more radical.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Law
Subjects:	K Law > KD England and Wales
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9780367209087
Last Modified:	22 Aug 2025 13:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/146222

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