Sir Edward Coke

No serious attempt has yet been made to supersede, or even adequately to supplement, the works of Coke and Richard Thomson, published respectively in 1642 and 1829, and now hopelessly out of date.

The two last–mentioned may be rapidly dismissed, as they were of little importance in the eyes of Littleton, or of Coke:

Coke cites an instance from the 34th year of Edward I.

Coke’s rendering is, if possible, the most absurd and gratuitous of all.

Such seem to be the opinions of Coke, who says that the phrase nisi per legem terræ means unless by due process of law.

” Coke thinks “that under this word balivus, in this act, is comprehended every justice, minister of the king, steward of the king, steward and bailiff.

Carter of New York (giving, I think, excessive reasons for mainly sound conclusions against an ill-informed and ill-framed project) followed in the path of Sir Edward Coke.

Antiquarian jurisprudence was militant and triumphant, with the compilers of the Abridgments and the printers of the Year Books for its armourers, and Sir Edward Coke for its champion;

we may be sure that it was aggravated by Coke’s pseudo-antiquarian pedantry and the personal hostility between him and Bacon.

Bentham is heavily indebted to Coke, and utilitarianism has inherited some of its most valuable ideas from Puritanism.

No Lord Chief-Justice of to-day could occupy anything like the position of Coke, or carry out reforms such as were achieved or attempted by Lord Mansfield.

As already stated, by far the greater part of the law of contract—one might almost say the whole of the law of torts, all the rules or doctrines of equity, several outlying branches of the law,—such, for example, as the principles embraced under the head of the conflict of laws,—either originally were, or still are, to be deduced from judicial decisions or, what is in reality the same thing, from …

After a long struggle, in which he refused to accept a Bill proposed by Wentworth and brought in by Coke, with the object of preventing Edition:

4, and in the same King’s time, if we believe my Lord Coke, 11, fo.

and finally, this fluctuating sovereignty has settled, not upon the people, but upon king, lords and commons, with a power unlimited, except as lord Coke observes, that it is unequal to impossibilities.

Coke also gives a curious illustration, not merely of the popular prejudice, but also of the government’s prejudice, against a new invention, if it were one that would deprive many persons of their employment.

“There was a new invention found out heretofore that bonnets and caps might be thickened in a fulling mill, by which means more might be thickened and fulled in one day, than by the labors of fourscore men who got their living by it.

Coke says, “The reason wherefore such a privilege is good in law, [that is, at the Common Law,] is because the inventor bringeth to and for the commonwealth a new manufacture by his invention, costs, and charges, and therefore it is reason that he should have a privilege for his reward, (and the encouragement of others in the like,) for a convenient time.

In Coke’s day it was still arguable that assumpsit would not lie against the executor, and not until the contrary had been decided was it possible to regard the executor as bearing in a general way the contractual liabilities of the testator.