Note on the text, editions, and translations; introduction; chronology; selected readings; table of regnal years; index.
Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), whose codification of English law has powerfully influenced lawyers, judges, and politicians into the contemporary era, began his career as a lawyer and went on to become a member of Parliament, solicitor general and recorder of London, speaker of the House of Commons, and attorney general and chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas and of the King's Bench.
The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke in three volumes, edited
by Steve Sheppard, is a welcome addition, and provides a rich and
full selection of the writings of Coke, who established the rule of
law and defined Common Law by defending the "traditional liberties"
of the English people from the abuses of power (including the
king's) and by writing down the English laws and court procedure.
Sheppard has done a splendid job of making Coke's writings
available and accessible, providing headnotes, a general
"Introduction", and an extensive "Chronology of Events" that
includes Coke's legacy. There are ample selections from Coke's
Reports (including the case de Libellis Famosis establishing
libel law), and from all four parts of Coke's Institutes,
including the entire discussion of the Magna Charta. The third
volume includes fascinating discussions of heresy, treason, and "Of
Felony by Conjuration, Witchcraft, Sorcery, or Inchantment." As a
companion to this edition, Liberty Fund has also published Law,
Liberty, and Parliament: Selected Essays on the Writings of Sir
Edward Coke, edited by Allen D. Boyer, which reprints essays on
Coke published during the twentieth century, including the chapter
in Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (1992).
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
Winter 2005
When it came to British law, Coke (1552-1634) was akin to a force
of nature. In addition to his duties in Parliament as Speaker of
the House, it fell to Coke to write down all of British law for
academic study. He also was the power behind numerous laws that
ended abuses of citizens by the crown; many of his ideas were
incorporated into the U.S. Constitution. This three-volume set
offers a large selection of his writings for a very reasonable
price.
Library Journal
April 15, 2004
The common law of England, unless repugnant to the Constitution or
altered by the General Assembly, has been adopted in 1-10 of the
Code of Virginia. The common law is derived from decisions, customs
and usage over time "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary." Enmeshed in the mists of history, the Virginia Supreme
Court has cited both Edward Coke and William Blackstone as primary
sources.
Edward Coke (1552-1634) is the first great expositor of the common
law. Coke possessed undeniable stature in his career as solicitor
general, attorney general, speaker of the House of Commons and lord
chief justice. His professional career straddled the reigns of
Queen Elizabeth and King James, when England made the transition
from a feudal to commercial society. The widespread development in
printing allowed Coke's influence to eclipse the writings of his
predecessors, John Fortescue and Thomas Littleton.
With the publication of Selected Writings, Liberty Fund has
provided ready access to Coke. Volume 1 begins with fifty-eight
cases between 1600-1615, starting with that most notable to
first-year law students, "Shelley's Case." Coke's collection and
publication of cases during his lifetime contributed to regularity
in the law and laid a solid foundation for judge's decisions based
on established precedent.
Volume II of Selected Writings contains extracts from his four-part
"Institutes on the Lawes of England" and were based largely in name
on Justinian's "Institutes," a studious recurrence to the Roman
basis of English civil law. The first part was subtitled "Coke upon
Littleton" and was his attempt to update Littleton's treatise on
real property. The next three parts of Coke's "Institutes"
contained in Volume II dealt respectively with statutes, crimes and
courts.
It is Coke's "Institutes" that provide his most enduring legacy.
Legal education of Colonial Virginians rested on Coke, and the
popular understanding of the meaning of common law was a function
of his "Institutes." Coke's assertion of Magna Carta and the
ancient constitution as binding on the prerogatives of the king had
a particular resonance at our revolution. Those martyred heroes of
English liberty--John Hampden and Algernon Sydney--based their
arguments on Coke no less than did George Mason and Thomas
Jefferson.
Volume III of Selected Writings contains Coke's speeches. His
willingness to bind the king to the law was a source of obvious
conflict, and James, citing Coke's perpetual turbulent carriage,"
removed him as lord chief justice in 1616. Most of the speeches in
Volume III follow his removal and concentrate on the defense of
liberties. His speeches related to the Petition of Right, in 1628,
are particularly critical to the intellectual underpinnings of
American independence.
Selected Writings is ably edited by Steve Sheppard, who is a law
professor at the University of Arkansas. Sheppard's prior works
include The History of Legal Education in the United States
(1999) and American Law: The Basics in Global Prospective
(2003). An historian's prospective is evident in the annotations,
notes and extensive chronology. Researchers who come across ancient
English statutes without calendar dates will find the table of
regnal years especially valuable.
Deference to well-established tradition has been a noted
characteristic of the law of Virginia. Present 1-10 has its
origins--and some of its language--in an act of the General
Assembly passed during May of 1776. The Supreme Court of Virginia,
as recently as January of 2004, reaffirmed that an act in
derogation of the common law will be strictly construed. The
Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke provides the modern
practitioner an insightful and definitive resource on our
common-law inheritance.
Thomas M. Moncure, Jr.
Virginia Lawyer
April 2004
. . .the reader of Sheppard's version of Coke is startled to see
that the basic problems of jurisprudence--the conflict between
efficiency and equity; the mystifying nature of the legal doctrines
that try to allow for multiple human purposes; the difficulty of
separating public and private, secular and spiritual, freedom and
responsibility--were essentially the same in Coke's day as they are
in ours. Coke himself was not a particularly modest man, and he
occasionally got slapped down when he put on airs. . . .And yet,
the basic theme in all his writing is that one ought to be somewhat
humble before the majesty of the law itself: a law divine in
inspiration and, in application, supremely wise. Whatever he was
like in person, certain humility (admittedly, some of it a bit
forced) emanates from his treatises, reports, and speeches. He
understood, as did Burke, that individually, men are foolish,
selfish, and irrational; the species (or at least its great judges,
lawyers, and treatise writers of the common law) collectively is
wise, however, and ignored at one's peril.
A reading of these volumes shows the strong debt we owe to Coke for
the basic principles of American constitutionalism: a government of
laws, not men; the necessity for strong reasons even for
legislators to depart from preexisting rules, while courts never
should; the responsibility of the courts truly to limit
legislatures and of executives to act only in accordance with the
fundamental law (for Coke "the common law"; for us, the
Constitution); reservation of the power to tax to the people's
representatives; and the indispensability (as our Framers
understood and as Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and others
frequently expressed) of law to order, morality to law, and
religion to morality. Coke's world, of course, was not ours--no
longer do we have the monarch or the hereditary aristocracy he
sought to accommodate as well as to contain. Even so, the need for
the courts and other governmental actors to be bound by the rule of
law--the need to avoid the acts of arbitrary power--is as profound
in our day as it was in Coke's.
Chronicles
August 2004
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