Lawyer Monthly Magazine August 2020 Edition

61 AUG 2020 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM LANDMARK LEGAL CASES WHICH HAVE SHAPED UK’S LAW The chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, ruled that King James I could not prohibit new buildings in London without the support of parliament. In giving his judgment, Chief Justice Coke set out the principle that the King had no power to declare new offences by proclamation: The King has no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him. In short, King James believed that he had the right to make any laws that he wished, but the court had opposed his view. By the end of the 17th century, the foundation for today’s Travelling back to the 18th century, this case brought upon the definition of ‘no man is above the law’. On 11 November 162, the King’s Chief Messenger who was accompanied by three other King’s messengers, broke into the home of writer John Entick after they suspected him of writing a libellous pamphlet against the government, on behalf of the Secretary of State. Over the course of four hours, the King’s men broke open locks and doors and searched all of the rooms before taking away 100 charts and 100 pamphlets, causing £2,000 of damage (£413,906 in 2020). The Case of Proclamations, 1610 Entick v Carrington, 1765 1 2 constitutional monarchy – where the king or queen respects the law-making authority of the elected parliament – become more prominent. The 1610 case of proclamations was drawn upon by the Supreme Court in 2017, when Gina Miller brought a case against the UK government, claiming that it couldn’t trigger Article 50 – and therefore Brexit – without an act of parliament. This just showcases the impact such landmark cases, like the above, have on today’s society and how they continue to shape law today. Entick sued the messengers for trespassing on his land. The judgment established the limits of executive power in English law: the state may act lawfully only in a manner prescribed by statute or common law, i.e., the secretary of state did not have the legal authority to issue a search warrant. This landmark decision also falls as part of the background to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and was described by the Supreme Court of the United States as “a ‘great judgment’, ‘one of the landmarks of English liberty’. To this day, thanks to this landmark case, law enforcement agencies can only do what the law allows. Donaldson v Becket, 1774 3 This ruling by the House of Lords held that copyright in published works was not perpetual and was instead subject to statutory limits. (Some scholars disagree on the reasoning behind the decision). This case is often upheld as the birthplace of modern copyright, as prior to 1774, copyright had no real fixed duration; The Statute of Anne (also known as the Copyright Act 1710) did exist at this point stating that those who purchased the right to copy a work from an author were intended to hold those rights for a maximum of 28 years. The statute never took root, however. The right to print James Thomson’s poems (The Seasons) was sold to a coalition of publishers including Thomas Becket. Two Scottish printers, Alexander and John Donaldson, began publishing an unlicensed edition, and Becket successfully obtained an injunction to stop them. This decision was appealed in Donaldson v Becket, and eventually went to the House of Lords.[63] After consulting with the judges of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer of Pleas, the Lords concluded that copyright was not perpetual and that the term permitted by the Statute of Anne was the maximum length of legal protection for publishers and authors alike. After the case, England became the first country to institute fixed-term copyright, whereby copyright holders could maintain monopoly control over their copyrights for a maximum of 28 years, after which the work would enter the public domain.