8812. John Hostetler, Sir Edward Coke (Chichester, England: Barry Rose Law Publishers, 1997) p139
8813. Ibid, p150 footnote 3. Selden Society Lecture on Coke in the Hall of Lincoln’s Inn on March 17, 1952.
8814. Ibid, p152
8815. Allen D. Boyer, Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) p84
8816. Hent Kalmo, Quentin Skinner, Sovereignty in Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) p1
8817. Daniel Philpott, “Westphalia, Authority, and International Society”, Sovereignty at the Millennium, Robert Jackson ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) p148
80
Long Parliament of 1641 when it was entrenched as one of three overriding documents of English liberty.12 Coke’s Reports and his famous four volume Institutes travelled to North America aboard The Mayflower, where they informed the legal professions and Presidents alike well into the nineteenth century. Samuel E. Thorpe, Professor of Legal History at Harvard University maintained that certain of Coke’s doctrines and ideas took firmer root in the colonies than at home and that much of American law need be traced back no further than to his books.13 Even Hobbes complained that Coke endeavoured throughout the Institutes to diminish the Crown’s authority.14 Coke’s legacy of jurisprudence significantly instructs U.S. Constitutional Law, and most profoundly in Marbury v Madison which cemented judicial independence and the predominance for judicial interpretation of the constitution.15
VVThe concept of sovereignty, an ambiguous term without a unitary definition, is much contested in the modern interconnected world that the term borders on irrelevant – assuming a sovereignty applied to existing entitical characterizations.16 For the purposes of discussion “the supreme authority within a territory” will suffice as definition. Contained within the definition are recognition of concerns about legitimacy, supremacy and territoriality, and the specific limits of each.17 Indeed, pinning the concept down is itself a politically contestable choice – suggesting some beginning point, or gestation period, perhaps that is how it may be best approached – as a thing in and of itself which immolates something priceless of one’s own by denying the use of it to others in a corporeal proprioceptive sense, excluding inclusions and including exclusions on contemporaneous and potentially ad hoc bases.[3] Indeed, Cynthia Weber suggests an ethereal entity as the sovereign – the very shadows of a corporeal existence, yet theoretically unsubstantiated in a continual process of creative destruction, redefinition and application to all potentialities of conscious organization. The origin and effect of sovereignty become synonymous.[4] This cogito ergo sum moment in sovereign ascension derives from the recognition that it is at one and the same time communities of sovereign states and communities as the foundation for sovereign states that produce, by intervention practices the effect, and guarantee, by agreement of an uncontested definition assumed through observation of a particular community, the origin of a sense of sovereignty.[5]