Early Modern Treatise Writers

Early Modern Treatise Writers gathers the judges and legal writers of England and Scotland from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who began systematically writing down and organizing the common law's accumulated case-by-case doctrine into coherent treatises, reports and institutional works. Figures such as Sir Edward Coke, whose Reports and Institutes became foundational reference works for generations of common lawyers, and Scotland's own institutional writers on its parallel legal tradition, made the common law teachable and citable in a way the earlier, purely case-by-case medieval tradition had not been.