This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King's Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, Parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it counters the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor's, Hale located Taylor's offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale's judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside King and Parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office, and should not ground accounts of the Restoration regime.

中文翻译：

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泰勒案中的主权和普通法司法办公室 (1675)

这篇文章认为，1675 年国王法庭对约翰泰勒诽谤上帝的定罪表明，首席大法官马修黑尔实施了一种法院、议会和王室联合立法的模式，该模式赋予普通律师卓越的权力，英格兰教会没有。这样做，它反驳了关于恢复英国法律的流行文献，后者将法律视为等级制度，普通律师从属于君主。黑尔没有遵循强调像泰勒这样的罪行的精神本质的成文法或教会法，而是将泰勒的罪行定位在诽谤的完全暂时的普通法管辖权中，这种管辖权主要存在于君主权限之外。黑尔的判决反映了他在法庭外的司法职务言论，他认为司法机构与国王和议会一起制定法律，但不服从这些机构，因为普通律师依赖于主权制定法规之外的法律渊源。因此，作为等级制度的主权语言是对独立普通法的派系攻击，试图使普通律师服从王权，而这在黑尔等律师的言辞和行使职权中遭到了抵制，不应根据恢复制度。