Edward Coke
historical figure · 2 works · 7 mentions · 21 anchored passages
Coke · Sir Edward Coke
in the texts
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John
Later legal commentator whose claim that women before 1215 could appeal for the death of any ancestor is rejected by McKechnie as unsupported.
There seems to be no authority for Coke’s hasty inference, that previous to 1215 a woman had an appeal for the death of any of her “ancestors”:
Contrast Coke, Second Institute, 32, who seems to suggest that one effect of Magna Carta was to take from the sheriff a jurisdiction over thefts previously enjoyed by him.
In translating the reissue of 1225, the Statutes at Large expand the word “praecipe” into “praecipe in capite,” for which there is no authority in any known text of Magna Carta, though it appears in Coke’s version of Henry’s charter (Sec.
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
Seventeenth-century English jurist whose Institutes are quoted, then accused of fabricating a self-serving interpretation of Magna Carta.
This example of Coke tends to show how utterly blind, or how utterly corrupt, English judges, (dependent upon the crown and the legislature), have been in regard to everything in Magna Carta, that went to secure the liberties of the people, or limit the power of the government.
Coke’s interpretation of this chapter of Magna Carta is of a piece with his absurd and gratuitous interpretation of the words “nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus,” which was pointed out in a former article, and by which he attempted to give a judicial power to the king and his judges, where Magna Carta had given it only to a jury.
Coke quotes this commentary, (in the original French,) and then endorses it in these words: