A Discourse Upon the Exposition and Understanding of Statutes: With Sir Thomas Egerton's Additions. Edited From Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (1942)

Reprint of first edition. Written anonymously at the end of the Year Book period, the Discourse Upon the Exposicion and Understandinge of Statutes is the earliest English treatise on the subject. Thorne's edition has the additional appeal of lengthy manuscript notes compiled from a copy owned by Sir Thomas Egerton [?1540-1617], an attorney who held several important posts in Elizabethan England including Solicitor-General and Lord Chancellor. "Professor Thorne ... has carried out his difficult task with great skill and has prefixed an introduction which can be regarded as the most authoritative and most richly documented discussion as yet upon the problems of statutory interpretation from the later fourteenth century ... to the age of Coke." T.F.T. Plucknett, Law Quarterly Review 60:242 cited in Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 810.

SAMUEL EDMUND THORNE [1907-1994] was the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Harvard Law School and one of the 20th century's most distinguished historians of English law. In addition to this work, Thorne is known for his monumental and definitive translation of Bracton's four-volume Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, edited by George Woodbine.