Bonham's Case

▪ British history

      (1610), legal case decided by Sir Edward Coke (Coke, Sir Edward), chief justice of England's Court of Common Pleas (Common Pleas, Court of), in which he asserted the supremacy of the common law in England, noting that the prerogatives of Parliament were derived from and circumscribed by precedent. He declared that “when an act of parliament is against common right or reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it and adjudge such act to be void.” Coke had already applied this doctrine to acts of the king and, in this case, was extending it to parliamentary legislation. However, the principle of judicial review of parliamentary acts implied by Bonham's Case never took hold in England, and Coke himself seems to have later abandoned the idea.

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