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"Coke was, as John Hostettler reminds us, "a skillful lawyer, a great Judge, an outstanding jurist, and a remarkable Parliamentary leader...who suffered imprisonment and risked his life in defence of freedom and of its essential ingredients, the principle of public trial, habeas corpus, the right to bail and against self-incrimination." Nevertheless, he had a darker side and he is, perhaps, revelaed at his worst when, for example, as Attorney-General he paid scant regard to both the law and evidence during his prosecution of Sir Walter Raleigh for treason. This account of Coke's life pulls no punches as it guides the reader from Coke's early days, through his activities while holding the highest judicial offices of state and, after his dismissal, to his time in Parliament."
Throughout his early career, Sir Edward Coke joined many of his contemporaries in his concern about the uncertainty of the common law. Coke attributed this uncertainty to the ignorance and entrepreneurship of practitioners, litigants, and other users of legal power whose actions eroded confidence in the law. Working to limit their behaviours, Coke also simultaneously sought to strengthen royal authority and the Reformation settlement. Yet the tensions in his thought led him into conflict with James I, who had accepted many of the criticisms of the common law. Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws reframes the origins of Coke's legal thought within the context of law reform and provides a new interpretation of his early career, the development of his legal thought, and the path from royalism to opposition in the turbulent decades leading up to the English civil wars.
Originally published: New ed. / by John Henry Thomas, ... John Farquhar Fraser. London: J. Butterworth & Sons, 1826. New introd. by Stephen Sheppard.
These volumes contain the most important works of the great English jurist-politician who set out to codify English common law. In his Reports and his Institutes, Coke set down a view of English law that has had a powerful influence on lawyers, judges, and politicians through the present day.