Edward Coke - Writings

Writings

Coke is best known for his written work – firstly his thirteen volumes of law reports, and secondly his four-volume Institutes of the Lawes of England. John Marshall Gest, writing in the Yale Law Journal, notes that "There are few principles of the common law that can be studied without an examination of Coke's Institutes and Reports which summed up the legal learning of his time", although "the student is deterred by the too common abuse of Coke's character and the general criticism of his writings as dry, crabbed, verbose and pedantic". John Campbell, in his The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, said that "His reasoning ... is narrow minded; utter contempt for method and style in his compositions", and says that Coke's Reports were "tinctured with quaintness and pedantry". Gest, noting this criticism, points out that:

Coke, like every man, was necessarily a product of the age in which he lived. His faults were the faults of his time, his excellencies those of all time. He was diffuse; he loved metaphor, literary quibbles and verbal conceits; so did Bacon, and so did Shakespeare. So did all the writers of his day. They were creative, not critical. But Coke as a law writer was as far superior in importance and merit to his predecessors, at least if we except Bracton, as the Elizabethan writers in general were superior to those whom they succeeded, and, as the great Elizabethans fixed the standard of our English tongue, so Coke established the common law on its firm foundation. A modern lawyer who heaps his abuse on Coke and his writings seems as ungrateful as a man who climbs a high wall by the aid of the sturdy shoulders of another and then gives his friend a parting kick in the face as he makes the final leap.