Success Quote by Edward Coke

A warning disguised as permission, Coke’s line grants you full dominion over what’s “yours” and then immediately fences it in. The phrasing is deceptively plain: “use your own property” sounds like an endorsement of private rights; “as not to injure” turns that right into a conditional license. It’s property talk that smuggles in neighborliness as a legal principle, insisting that ownership is not an island.

The specific intent is regulatory without sounding regulatory. Coke isn’t preaching generosity; he’s outlining a boundary rule that can be enforced: your freedom to build, burn, drain, blast, or profit stops at the point where it materially harms someone else’s land or livelihood. That compact little “as” does heavy lifting, converting moral intuition (don’t harm) into an operational test (did your use injure another’s property?). It’s a blueprint for nuisance law, for the idea that the state doesn’t need to micromanage every act if it can police harms after the fact.

The subtext is political. Early modern England was a pressure cooker of enclosure, expanding commerce, and increasingly assertive landowners. “Property” was becoming the engine of power; Coke’s formulation keeps that engine from running over everyone in its path. It’s also a class-stabilizing sentence: it protects the smaller holder from the larger one’s spillover costs while reaffirming that property rights remain the baseline, not a privilege granted by grace.

Calling Coke a “businessman” flattens the real context: this is jurist logic aimed at making a market society legible, predictable, and governable by rules rather than retaliation.