Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- 10 The King's Conscience, the Lord Chancellor's Foot
- 11 Star Chamber: Keeping England in Quiet
- 12 Troture
- 13 The Writ and Charter of Liberty
- 14 Rex Lex v. Lex Rex: Sir Edward Coke
- 15 Oedipus Lex: The Trial of Charles I
- 16 Free-born John
- 17 From Restoration to Revolution and Reaction
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - Rex Lex v. Lex Rex: Sir Edward Coke
from PART II - CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- 10 The King's Conscience, the Lord Chancellor's Foot
- 11 Star Chamber: Keeping England in Quiet
- 12 Troture
- 13 The Writ and Charter of Liberty
- 14 Rex Lex v. Lex Rex: Sir Edward Coke
- 15 Oedipus Lex: The Trial of Charles I
- 16 Free-born John
- 17 From Restoration to Revolution and Reaction
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We have a national law appropriate to this kingdom. If you tell me of other laws, you are gone. I will only speak of the laws of England.
Edward Coke in parliament, 1628The appeal to precedent is in the law courts merely a useful fiction by which judicial decision conceals its transformation into judicial legislation; and a fiction is nonetheless a fiction because it has emerged from the Courts into the field of politics or of history.
A. V. Dicey, Lectures Introductory to the Study of the LawEdward Coke was born in the reign of Edward VI to Robert Coke, himself a lawyer of Lincoln's Inn. After a period at Trinity College, Cambridge, Edward became a student at the Inner Temple, being called to the Bar in 1578. Living in turbulent times, Coke honed his views of the law into a weapon not merely by learned disquisition, but by excavation, and irrigation. ‘Out of the old fields must spring and grow the new corne’, he was to write. His learning was prodigious, his industry untiring. As a practising barrister he kept copious notes of his own cases and those of others living and dead, a treasure trove from which he would later draw immense riches. All that he said would have the veneer of precedent and antiquity. A legal titan, he is considered to have done more than any other to create the modern notion of the rule of law. 3 One recent biographer has written, ‘what Shakespeare is to those who write in English, Sir Edward Coke has been to lawyers of the English-speaking world’. To an American judge he was ‘the oracle and ornament of the common law’. He was not, however, a nice man. He was disagreeable, irascible, arrogant, and a bully. Most notoriously he whipped his own daughter into submission when she had the temerity to demur at marrying the duke of Buckingham's brother, a match made not in heaven but to further her father's frustrated ambitions.
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- Law, Liberty and the ConstitutionA Brief History of the Common Law, pp. 119 - 132Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015