In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most important modes of studying the past was the study of the law - the historical outlook which arose in each nation was in part the product of its law, and therefore, in turn of its history. In clarifying the relation of the historical outlook of seventeenth-century Englishmen to the study of law, and pointing out its political implication, Pocock shows how history's ground was laid for a more philosophical approach in the eighteenth century.

    He was the prime author of the Petition of Right, so this biography is simultaneously the story of the roots of our form of free government. But the man who rose to be the Chief Justice of England was eventually dismissed from the bench in disgrace.