Law Reporting in England 1550-1650

English law reports between 1550 and 1650 seem far more accessible today than the "year books" that preceded them. This is not because they were produced differently, for a different readership or by a different kind of reporter, but because the legal system itself had changed. We also encounter in the Tudor period the first reports written by eminent lawyers, two of whom (Plowden and Coke) saw a selection of them through the press in their lifetimes. Recent editorial work on the better reports has revealed something of the way they were compiled, and also of what was omitted when contemporary notes were turned into printed volumes.Coke's reports are the most famous, traditionally cited simply as The Reports. Work has just begun on an edition of the underlying notebooks (first discovered just forty years ago), which will probably require at least six volumes. Coke's reporting style was controversial, and his alleged subjectivity was seized upon by Francis Bacon as one of the grounds for bringing him down in 1616. However, Bacon's scheme of 1617 to engage professional reporters, paid by the crown, seems to have collapsed after a few years. Law reporting was thus to remain a matter of private initiative until the end of the eighteenth century, and many of the best reports - even those written by judges - have still not been published. Anyone seeking to trace the evolution of a legal doctrine or practice before about 1700 must regard manuscript reports as an essential recourse

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