Sir Edward Coke

Life and ideas

Edward Coke was Attorney General, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and of the King's Bench under Elizabeth I and James I, and later a leading member of Parliament. As a judge, he held that the common law, which he called the artificial reason of the law, is the accumulated learning of generations of judges and not the private reason of any one person, even the king. In the Case of Proclamations (1610) he ruled that the king cannot create new offences by proclamation, and in Dr Bonham's Case (1610) he suggested that courts might refuse to apply an Act of Parliament contrary to common right and reason. King James dismissed him in 1616. Coke later played a leading part in the Petition of Right of 1628. His Reports and his four volumes of Institutes became the standard textbooks of the common law and influenced the American colonists.