Word: cokes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Straight Battle. Coke is still constantly cited by lawyers and judges on both sides of the Atlantic, e.g., in Chief Justice Earl Warren's majority opinion on the Watkins case (TIME, July i). The complexities and oddities of Coke's Commentary upon Littleton helped make a lawyer of Patrick Henry in six weeks, drove Daniel Webster to "despair," and got from Thomas Jefferson the tribute of being the law's "universal elementary book...
...Coke, a barrister's son. caught the attention of his fellow lawyers when he was still an Inner Temple student, by framing a charge in Latin against the Temple's chef for bad cooking. He left the Temple gates to start practicing-according tp legend with only "a horse, a rapier, ten pounds, a ring set with three rose diamonds and the motto (O Prepare.' " His first client was a parson who had been served with a writ of slander. The case was thrown out when Coke spotted that the word messoinges, i.e., lies, had been translated...
King's Watchdog. Coke climbed fast-recorder of Norwich, M.P. for Aldeburgh, solicitor general and recorder of London, Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1594 Elizabeth raised him to be Her Majesty's Attorney General. In this post Coke's success was so great (he prosecuted both the traitorous Earl of Essex and the wretched Guy Fawkes) that James I made him Chief Justice of the Common Pleas-and overnight Coke became another...
...longer the "King's watchdog," he became the watchdog of the common law. The historic Coke maxims began to roll out. "No man may be punished for his thoughts"; "And if every man should be examined upon his oath, what opinion he holdeth concerning any point of religion, he is not bound to answer . . ."; "When an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, the common law will. . . adjudge such Act to be void...
...century and a half later the Massachusetts Assembly was to declare the Stamp Act "against Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen and, therefore, according to the Lord Coke, null and void." And it was to give effect to this same manner of ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court itself was brought into existence...