Edward Coke Defied King James

In the 1607 Case of Prohibitions, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke overturned a land-dispute decision made personally by King James I. Coke ruled that common-law cases required judges with legal training and could not be decided through the king's natural reasoning alone. James angrily called it treason to place the monarch beneath the law, but Coke replied that "the King ought not to be under any man, but under God and the law." The ruling established that the king could not personally decide legal cases and strengthened the authority of England's courts.

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