Each book here is published beside the pages it cites. The book opens as its PDF; every citation in the notes is a link, and a click opens the cited page in a reading copy of the source, scrolled to the page, with the cited pages marked — so a quotation and its pin can be read against the original without leaving the screen. Only public-domain pages are published; a page still in copyright, or reproduced under a licence, is held in the library and marked rather than shown.
Immunity · Book · pre-publishing edition · September 15, 2026
The case that founded official immunity was a documented miscarriage of justice, a death by drowning recast as murder, a conviction on examinations taken down in a language the witnesses did not speak, and a court that answered the surviving kinsman’s sworn complaint against the trial judge by defacing it. Six Parts put the question the decree reserved to every order that has answered it, cited at the page.
The Fall of Babylon and the Making of Jewish Identity
Ezra 9:2 calls the returned exiles “the holy seed” and says they have mingled it with the peoples of the lands. The phrase occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible in that sense, and within a generation of its first use the community at Jerusalem had put away its foreign wives and their children and had begun to keep its membership by written pedigree. This book asks where the idiom and the programme came from.
The Creation Narrative in the Hebrew and Its Versions
This book began with one word in one verse: the “now” that opens the second chapter’s account of the making of man, read against the six days of the first, and the question whether the second chapter continued the first or went back over it. It is a reading, of three chapters of one book, and not a history of their interpretation. It is restorative because it restores the text’s own order against the versions that rearranged it, and its own words against the versions that dispersed them; and the versions are not obstacles between the reader and the text but witnesses, each faithful somewhere and unfaithful somewhere else.
— Mr. Justice Holloway, King's Bench, The Trial of the Seven Bishops (King's Bench, 1688), 1739 print, p. 413
“To make it a Libel it must be False, it must be Malicious, and it must tend to Sedition.”
— Mr. Justice Powell, King's Bench, The Trial of the Seven Bishops (King's Bench, 1688), 1739 print, p. 422
“If this be once allowed of, there will need no Parliament, all the Legislature will be in the King.”
— Mr. Justice Powell, King's Bench, The Trial of the Seven Bishops (King's Bench, 1688), 1739 print, p. 424
“Access to the sovereign must not be shut up in case of the subjects distresses.”
— The Court of Star Chamber, resolution of the whole Court, Wrenham's Case (Star Chamber, 1618), Hobart 220, 80 Eng. Rep. 367
“In causa sua propria nemo potest esse Judex.”
— William Lyndwood, gloss on Stephen Langton's constitution (Oxford, 1222), Provinciale (Oxford, 1679), p. 312, gloss r. 'In his own cause no man can be judge.'
“So long as he is the true minister of God, and pronounceth according to his worde.”
— The Geneva Bible's annotators, note on Deuteronomy 17:12, The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560), fol. 88v, original spelling
“Ut poena ad paucos, metus ad omnes perveniat, without respect of persons, be they publique or private, great or small.”
— Sir Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, cap. 5, The Court of Star-Chamber, p. 63 (London, 1797 ed.)
“Geue no sentence before thou hast herde the cause, but first let men tell out their tayles.”
“Go not to lawe with the iudge: for he wyll iudge accordynge to hys awne honoure.”
— Ecclesiasticus 8:14, Great Bible, The Byble in Englyshe (Great Bible, Cranmer ed., 1540), Jesus the sonne of Syrach, fo. xxxix
“Heare the small as well as the greate, and be afrayed of no man, for the iudgement is Gods.”
— Deuteronomy 1:17, Great Bible, The Byble in Englyshe (Great Bible, 1540), Deuteronomium, chapter 1
“Questions which merely lurk in the record, neither brought to the attention of the court nor ruled upon, are not to be considered as having been so decided as to constitute precedents.”
“Let them be Lions, but yet Lions vnder the Throne; Being circumspect, that they doe not checke, or oppose any Points of Soueraigntie.”
— Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625), LVI, Of Iudicature, p. 324 (1625 spelling)
“Hereafter the Greatness of a Judge or Magistrate shall be no Sanctuary or Protection to him against Guiltiness.”
— Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor, in his submission to the House of Lords, 1621, A Collection of the Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord Verulam (2nd ed., London, 1721), p. 27
“The questioning of Men in eminent Places, hath the same Terror, though not the same Rigour with the Punishment.”
— Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor, to the House of Lords, 1621, A Collection of the Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord Verulam (2nd ed., London, 1721), p. 30
“You will make Bribery to be unpunish'd, if he who carrieth the Bribe shall not be a Witness.”
— Sir Edward Coke, in the House of Commons, 17 March 1621, A Collection of the Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord Verulam (2nd ed., London, 1721), p. 16
“If the Fountains be muddy, what will the Streams be? If the great Dispenser of the King's Conscience be corrupt, who can have any Courage to plead before him?”
— Sir Robert Philips, reporting to the House of Commons, 17 March 1621, A Collection of the Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord Verulam (2nd ed., London, 1721), pp. 11–12
“no Court can be esteemed in Law, or Reason, a competent Judge of its own Errors”
— Thomas Hobbes, the Philosopher in his Dialogue on the common laws, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681), in The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1750), pp. 606–07
“to judge in a point of difference, hearing but one partie speake, is assuredly to be vnjust”
— The charge at the Norwich assizes, 1607, printed under Sir Edward Coke's name, The Lord Coke his Speech and Charge (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1607), sigs. C2r–C3v
“although malice be the accuser, justice should be the punisher”
— The Court of Star Chamber, sentencing a justice of the peace, 11 October 1605, as reported by John Hawarde, Hawarde, Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609 (W. P. Baildon ed., London, 1894), pp. 234–35 (Throgmorten v. Stafforde)
“whether the ministers of justice may oppress with impunity!”
— Senator Clinton, dissenting in the New York Court for the Correction of Errors, Yates v. Lansing, 9 Johns. 395, 441 (N.Y. 1811)
“The right to sue and defend in the courts is the alternative of force. In an organized society it is the right conservative of all other rights, and lies at the foundation of orderly government.”
— The Supreme Court of the United States, Chambers v. Baltimore & Ohio R.R., 207 U.S. 142, 148 (1907)
“so that no wrong or injury, either publick or private, can be done, but that this shall be reformed or punished in one court or other by due course of law”
— Sir Edward Coke, on the King's Bench, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1797 ed.), p. 71