Centre of Law and Religion

Law and Religion Scholars Network

Conferences

LARSN holds an annual conference in Cardiff in Spring each year as well as regular conferences for doctoral students working in the field.

LARSN Conference 2011

The most recent LARSN conference and meeting was held at Cardiff on Tuesday 17th May 2011. It was attended by over 90 academics from the UK and across the globe and over40 academic papers were presented at this year's conference, covering a wide range of subjects such as the future of the Coronation Oath, the charitable status of new religious movements and whether the Jedi Knights should be considered to be a religion.

Three themed sessions were held. The first of these focused on ‘Clashing Rights’ and was convened by Matthew Gibson of Liverpool University. The papers presented in this session explored how freedom of religion has collided with other rights, looking at both international and domestic human rights law, discrimination law and approaches in other jurisdictions. The other two themed sessions focused upon ‘Legal Pluralism’ and were convened by Amy Jackson of the University of Reading. The first of these sessions examined subjective legal pluralism and focused on how legal subjects themselves develop understandings of what law is. The second of these sessions examined institutional legal pluralism, looking at developments within legal systems.

The conference also included the fourth annual general meeting of LARSN, chaired by Dr Russell Sandberg, at which it was decided to hold a two-day LARSN conference at Cardiff in 2012, which will be supported by a nominal conference fee. Professor Peter Edge of Oxford Brookes also kindly offered to host another conference for doctoral students in 2011.

The Network is grateful to Sharron Alldred, Sarah Kennedy and Helen Calvert of the Postgraduate Office at Cardiff Law School for their detailed organisation of the conference.

LARSN Conference 2011