Robert Wintermute: How should courts deal with claims of conscience?
Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty
Date: 2017-06-16

This video is a recording of a lecture from the 'Exempting Conscientious Beliefs in UK Law' Conference, held on 13 June 2017 at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and convened by Mr John Adenitire.

The speaker is Professor Robert Wintemute, Professor of Human Rights Law, King's College London.

A significant volume of UK cases have been decided on whether or not individuals with conscientious beliefs (whether or not religious) should be accommodated in the face of legal requirements that contradict their beliefs. The most recent high profile case is the Ashers Baking Case (otherwise known as the Gay Cake case) where the NI Court of Appeal held that a Christian bakery was not entitled to refuse to bake a case embedded with a slogan saying ‘Support Gay Marriage’. This is only one of a series of high profile UK cases. 
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Despite this rich case law there is no single monograph in the UK dedicated to tackling the doctrinal and theoretical complexity of this case law. The conference aimed to fill this scholarly absence by bringing together high calibre scholars to engage with this case law with the view of publishing the outputs as an edited collection.