This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1607, King James I told his judges that he intended to sit as a judge himself, since he believed the law was founded on natural reason and he had as much of that as any lawyer. Sir Edward Coke, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, told him he could not. Cases, Coke said, are not decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law, a reason that requires long study and experience before a man is qualified to exercise it, and the king had not had that training. James, by later report, was furious, and said this meant the law would make him subject to the law, which he took as treason to even suggest. Coke's reply, that the king was indeed under the law, is the line historians still quote, and Prohibitions del Roy became the moment an English judge told an English king, to his face, that the crown does not sit above its own courts.
Coke did not stop there. In Dr. Bonham's Case in 1610, a dispute over the College of Physicians' power to fine and imprison an unlicensed doctor, Coke went further still, suggesting that when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to perform, the common law will control it and adjudge it void. Later historians disagree sharply about how far to read this: some see the first stirring of what would become, across the Atlantic and two centuries later, the American doctrine of judicial review; others read it more narrowly, as a rule for interpreting an ambiguous statute rather than a claim that judges could strike down a clear one. Both readings remain live in the scholarship, and this atlas records the disagreement rather than picking a side.
What is not in dispute is what happened to Coke personally. James I dismissed him as Chief Justice in 1616, transparently for being too independent a judge to tolerate. It should have been the end of his public career. Instead Coke went into Parliament, where the same stubbornness that had cost him his robes made him one of the fiercest voices against royal overreach, and where, in 1628, he was the principal drafter of the Petition of Right, the document that told Charles I in writing what Coke had told his father to his face: no taxation without Parliament's consent, no imprisonment without cause shown, no billeting of troops on private households, no martial law in peacetime. A judge who lost his bench for saying the king was under the law spent his retirement making Parliament write that principle down. Four hundred years on, an English or American lawyer arguing that the executive is bound by law it did not itself write is still standing, whether they know it or not, on ground Coke cleared.