In Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws: Religion, Politics and Jurisprudence, 1578–1616, David Chan Smith sets out to correct existing perceptions of Sir Edward Coke's contribution to the history of English jurisprudence. Crucially, as Smith makes clear in the opening pages of the introduction, he endeavors to reconcile the two faces of Coke, perhaps best encapsulated by the seeming contradiction of, on the one hand, attempting to tackle shortcomings in the royal administration while, on the other, striving to uphold the authority of the monarchy. Hence, although this book claims not to be a biography in the strict sense, the thrust driving Smith's argument is nevertheless biographical and will elicit biographical responses from readers invested in different interpretations of Coke's career and politics.

For students and scholars of legal history with at best only a passing interest in Coke, the real value of the book lies in its nature as a case study that illustrates a much deeper challenge to a number of interpretive angles that have tended to govern debates in English political history. Refreshingly, Smith's argument defies the binary terms of liberty and royal prerogative that have structured so many readings of English legal and constitutional history. Instead Smith—correctly, I think—organically embeds Coke's jurisprudence in the latter's legal practice. In other words, rather than advancing a political theory of the law, Coke practiced an applied form of jurisprudence; a jurisprudence that saw the common law as the ultimate extent of its remit and that centered on providing immediate remedies to the ills that afflicted and hampered the law's many processes.

Naturally, such a position, rooted in the practice of the law and underpinned by a deep veneration for the antiquity of its institutions, brought Coke into conflict with the increasingly absolutist antics of Charles I: “Under the rising sun of absolutism Coke's simple assumption about the purity and authority of the common law hardened into resistance” (12). Perhaps Smith is too eager to call Coke's position “principled” (13), but a resolute defense of the common law's perceived integrity render's Coke's position over the years nevertheless consistent. While “principled” suggests an ideological position of one sort or another, the case for Coke as a consistent believer in and practitioner of the common law is made very strongly in this book.

We obtain a real insight into Coke's politics by understanding his legal conservatism, his reliance on medieval continuities, and his hostility to “judicial entrepreneurship”: as Coke asserted, “So in the Common wealth (Justice being the main preserver therof) if one Court should usurp, or incroach upon another, it would introduce incertainty, subvert Justice, and bring all things in the end to confusion” (46). The implied center of this and similar passages is not the comment on jurisdictions but the observation that “Justice” is the “main preserver” of the “Common wealth.” It is in the context, then, that Coke chose to clamp down on the influence of private interest on public power, whether in the case of the draining of the fens of East Anglia or in his gradual opposition to the vested interest of the king's body natural where the royal courts and administration was concerned.

Occasionally, Smith shows deference to the political dichotomy he seeks to overcome, such as when he remarks that “Coke's constitutionalism could decouple from its dependence on the centrality of the monarch,” (18) yet this is to read politically, when in fact Coke's area of operation was jurisprudence. Read legally, on the other hand, Coke's position remains indeed consistent and grounded in a belief of the common law as a guardian of the public good. The fate of Sir John Fortescue studies has demonstrated the ineluctable yet unrewarding temptation of inserting early legal theorists and practitioners into a teleological narrative of constitutionalism. Much of Coke's seemingly incongruous behavior, particularly in his later years, can be explained by thinking of his primary loyalty not to the king or parliament but to the common law as an institution; in other words, Coke, just as Fortescue before him (and this is what careful study of his intellectual forbearer shows), was not so much a constitutionalist as a dedicated institutionalist who championed the integrity of England's legal system at every turn and, it would appear, at any cost.

Writing about Sir Edward Coke is much like writing about the common law: the challenge is to synthesize scattered fragments, to make systemic sense of situational instances, to infer a code of conduct from countless gestures. The common law is—above all else—method and practice, and Coke was first and foremost a practitioner. Smith deserves praise for having written about a difficult topic through an even more restrictive lens, that of the eccentric and formidable mind of Coke. This book does not make for easy reading; much of it could certainly have been presented in a more accessible manner. However, this is an important book not only on Coke but on some of the central concerns of England's common law in the early modern period.