I was once sitting knee-to-knee with a woolsack full of judges at the State Opening of Parliament, and I asked them how far they were concerned with ethical issues in their work. They said “not at all”; such issues were the task of jurisprudence, not of legal practitioners. But I believe that ethics are bound up with the actual practice of the law and I want to point to three ways in which they interact.

I hope that I shall have the sympathy of the Society in attempting to respond to a request to speak about the legal implications of a body which had no standing in canon, ecclesiastical, civil or common law. The Lambeth Conference was a gathering of persons individually invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to meet him for three weeks in the University of Kent at Canterbury. Finance for the meeting came from a number of corporate bodies but none of them had any control over what happened. The Archbishop had asked a number of persons to assist him in the organisation of the meeting but the ultimate control of it was in his hands, subject to the willingness of those who were there to fall in with what was proposed. During the last week of the meeting some seventy resolutions were passed, but none of them, with one possible exception, has any legal effect of any kind.

In the coming months, the General Synod and then the diocesan synods will be considering legislation enabling bishops of the Church of England to ordain women to the office of priest, and making related provisions as to the manner and effect of this change in the law and practice of the Church of England. The purpose of this article is not to examine that draft legislation, which at the time of writing is still being subjected to line-by-line scrutiny in a Revision Committee of the General Synod, but to sketch in some of the legal background against which it was prepared. In particular, there is a fundamental issue: why is legislation needed? To which may be added: why is Parliamentary authority, expressed by the approval of a Measure, required for any necessary change in the Canons?

At its April meeting, the Governing Body considered a varied agenda, including three items of legal interest. These were: firstly, an amendment relating to the size and composition of the membership of the Representative Body of the Church in Wales; secondly, the second reading of a bill to amend the canon law of the Church in Wales relating to clerical disabilities, and, thirdly, a motion seeking to render retired clerics ineligible for membership of Parochial Church Councils within the province.

“I believe that in the years to come it will be the best thing this government has done and one of the best things any government has done in this century.”