‘till all law is annihilated’: Godwin versus the Bar

Abstract

In Political Justice, Godwin expresses his distrust of English common law, which he describes as a system of endemic indeterminacy, and his dislike of the profession of legal advocacy: “a lawyer can scarcely fail to be a dishonest man.” Shortly after the publication of Political Justice, Godwin argued in print with Lord Chief Justice James Eyre over the interpretation of 25 Edward III, the statute codifying treason, and later with Lord Grenville and William Pitt’s legislative response to the failure of the 1794 treason trials. While contemporaries such as John Horne Tooke lauded Godwin’s arguments, particularly against Eyre, during the build up to and the immediate aftermath of the treason trials, recent scholarship has noted that Godwin’s tracts were, from a legal standpoint, largely ineffective due to his ignorance of black-letter law. In Cursory Strictures and Considerations Godwin grounds his arguments around the valorization of 25 Edward III, yet in doing so he confuses substantive treason for constructive treason. Part of the problem for Godwin was that he needed to lionize 25 Edward III in order to attack what he considered the government’s misinterpretation of the statute. This essay examines how Godwin’s arguments depart from black-letter law in Cursory Strictures and Considerations to reconstruct ‘imaginatively’ the government’s lawyers in line with his depiction of legal advocacy in Political Justice.