Success Quote by Edward Coke

Custom is a lousy alibi when the thing being defended can’t survive a serious thought. Edward Coke’s line lands like a judicial slap: time does not transmute nonsense into authority. The phrasing is doing careful work. “How long soever” concedes the seduction of tradition - the comforting idea that longevity equals legitimacy. Then comes the guillotine clause: “if it be against reason.” Not immoral, not unpopular, not inefficient. Against reason. Coke isn’t just arguing that bad rules should be repealed; he’s asserting a hierarchy where rationality sits above habit, and where law is supposed to be something more than a scrapbook of inherited practices.

The subtext is a power move. In Coke’s England, “custom” often meant the prerogatives of monarchs, entrenched local privileges, and the kind of “we’ve always done it this way” that conveniently protects whoever already has leverage. By insisting that irrational customs have “no force in law,” Coke arms judges - and by extension Parliament and the common-law tradition - with a weapon against arbitrary authority. It’s also a quiet rebuke to legal formalism: the law is not validated by age alone, but by intelligibility.

Calling Coke a “businessman” misses the point; he was a premier jurist and parliamentarian who helped define limits on the Crown. The context is constitutional friction, where the stakes were not theoretical. “Reason” here is a claim about who gets to rule: not mere inheritance, but arguments that can be publicly defended. It’s an early-modern version of a still-live demand: show your work, or lose your power.