Edward Coke

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Edward Coke : biography

01 February 1552 – 03 September 1634

The Reports have gained significant academic acclaim; Theodore Plucknett, writing in the Cornell Law Quarterly, describes them as works of "incomparable richness" with a "profound influence upon the literature, and indeed the substance, of English law". John Baker has described them as "perhaps the single most influential series of named reports", and even Francis Bacon, Coke’s rival, wrote praisingly of them, saying "Had it not been for Sir Edward Coke’s Reports (which though they may have errors, and some peremptory and extrajudicial resolutions more than are warranted, yet they contain infinite good decisions and rulings over of cases), for the law by this time had been almost like a ship without ballast; for that the cases of modern experience are fled from those that are adjudged and ruled in former time".

Although loaned to friends and family, and therefore in slight public circulation, Coke’s Reports were never formally used during his lifetime. Select cases were published in 1600, containing the most famous of his decisions and pleadings, while a second volume in 1602 was more chronological in nature. The third part, published in the same year, was also chronological, while the fourth, published in 1604, was arranged by subject. The fifth part, published in 1605, is arranged similarly, as is the sixth, published in 1607. Five more volumes were published until 1615, but Coke died before he could publish a single bound copy. No trace has been found of the draft manuscript.

Some academics have questioned the accuracy of the Reports. Coke’s famous Case of Proclamations, and his speech there, was first brought into the public consciousness through its inclusion in Volume 12 of his Reports, and Roland G. Usher, writing in the English Historical Review, notes that "Certain manuscripts at Hatfield House and elsewhere seem to throw some doubt upon this famous account of a famous interview". One of the reasons given for possible inaccuracies in the later volumes of the Reports is that they were published posthumously. In July 1634, officials acting on order of the king had seized Coke’s papers, but a 1641 motion in the House of Commons restored the extant papers to Coke’s eldest son. The twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the reports were based on fragments of notes several decades old, and not on Coke’s original manuscript.

Institutes

Coke’s other main work was the Institutes of the Lawes of England, a four-volume treatise described as his "masterwork". The first volume, the Commentary upon Littleton, known as Coke on Littleton, was published in 1628; it is ostensibly a commentary on Sir Thomas Littleton’s Treatise on Tenures, but actually covered many areas of the law of his time. The other three volumes were all published after his death, and covered 39 constitutional statutes of importance (starting with the Magna Carta), the law relating to criminal law, and constitutional and administrative law respectively. While the Reports were intended to give an explanation of the law chronologically, Coke’s intentions with the Institutes were to provide an English language tutorial for those students studying law at the Inns of Court. This served as an alternative to the Roman law lectures at university, which were based on Latin; according to Bowen it was "a double vision; the Institutes as authority, the Reports as illustration by actual practise".

Part one, the Commentary upon Littleton, was undoubtedly the most famous; copies were exported to the United States early in the colonial era, and the work was first printed in an American edition in 1812 – by this point the English version was in its sixteenth edition, and had been commented on itself by various later legal authorities. As with the Reports, Coke’s Institutes became a standard textbook in the United States, and was recorded in the law libraries of Harvard College in 1723 and Brown University in 1770; John Jay, John Adams, Theophilus Parsons and Thomas Jefferson were all influenced by it. John Rutledge later wrote that "Coke’s Institutes seems to be almost the foundations of our law", while Jefferson stated that "a sounder Whig never wrote more profound learning in the orthodox doctrine of British liberties". The Third Institutes has been described as "the first really adequate discussion of treason, a work which went far towards offering the remedy of a humanized common law to the injustices of trial procedures".