This is Episode 8B of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the Tuesday contemporary-application episode of Week 8, following Saturday’s Episode 8, “The Common Law Will Control,” on Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart struggle. Every episode of this series asks the same question of every consequential action: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

This is Episode 8, the opening of Arc III — English Liberty — and the first of the series to turn from the question of how to govern without a king to the harder English question of how to bind a king who very much remains on his throne. It is the story of Sir Edward Coke and the idea he did more than any single man to forge: that the law stands above the crown. We trace what the common law actually was — a law its own practitioners claimed no one had made, found rather than