"Throughout his early career, Sir Edward Coke joined many of his contemporaries in his concern about the uncertainty of the common law. Coke attributed this uncertainty to the ignorance and entrepreneurship of practitioners, litigants, and other users of legal power whose actions eroded confidence in the law. Working to limit their behaviours, Coke also simultaneously sought to strengthen royal authority and the Reformation settlement. Yet the tensions in his thought led him into conflict with James I, who had accepted many of the criticisms of the common law. Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws reframes the origins of Coke's legal thought within the context of law reform and provides a new interpretation of his early career, the development of his legal thought, and the path from royalism to opposition in the turbulent decades leading up to the English civil wars"--"'Certainty is the mother of quietness and repose', Sir Edward Coke wrote in the first volume of his Institutes . Over a century later, Lord Mansfield made a similar observation, explaining that 'the great object in every branch of the law . is certainty'. 1 Sharing this preoccupation, the two chief justices worked to reform English law during periods of discontinuity.

But the imperatives for reform under Coke were different from those that drove Mansfi eld: they did not emerge from the decrepitude of the law or its need to adapt to new conditions. Instead, Coke worked within a dynamic and chaotic system. The sixteenth-century fluorescence of English law had driven its transformation and the confessional differences of the Reformation brought new challenges to the practice of the law. 2 This book evaluates the influence of these contexts of legal and religious change on Coke's understanding of the law from 1578 to 1616. His ambition to reform the law explains why Coke simultaneously confronted abuses in royal administration even as he believed he was acting to defend the authority of the monarchy. This book examines this paradox, and in doing so, suggests how otherwise royalist Englishmen reached conclusions that slowly led them into opposition"--.