Success Quote by Edward Coke

Consent is doing work here: it turns moral proximity into legal liability. "Those who consent to the act and those who do it shall be equally punished" is less a pious maxim than a hard-edged theory of causation. Coke isn’t interested in the comforting story that guilt belongs only to the hand that swings the weapon. He’s drawing a clean line from permission to outcome, insisting that authorization is an action in itself.

The phrasing is deliberately blunt. "Consent" sounds passive, almost polite, but Coke yanks it into the realm of agency. The structure flattens the hierarchy between mastermind and foot soldier: no sliding scale for the quiet enabler, no moral discount for the person who "just went along". That equalizing move has a political edge. In a world of patrons, retainers, and powerful men who could commission harm while keeping their own hands clean, the sentence reads like a direct attack on plausible deniability as a class privilege.

The subtext is about deterrence and social order. If the law only punished the visible perpetrator, it would invite a market in intermediaries: let someone else do the dirty work, outsource the risk. Coke’s line tries to shut that down by making consent expensive. It also broadcasts a message about community responsibility: toleration can be complicity, and complicity can be criminal.

Contextually, it fits Coke’s broader project of strengthening the authority of common law against backroom power. The sentence is short because it wants to be portable: easy to remember, easy to cite, hard to wriggle out of.