Four hundred years ago, the man his English subjects knew as James I gave judgment in a case in the Star Chamber. It was the last time he would do so, and the final occasion on which a monarch of England or Scotland would publicly sit in judgment on his subjects. 1 His son was rather more notable for having his subjects sit in judgment on him. James's attempts to interfere in the work of his judges have been a staple of constitutional history and discussed in some detail. 2 But James's own judicial activity has been ignored.Conveniently for the theme of this volume, James VI and I was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England. However much he wanted to be king of the single kingdom of Great Britain, his two realms remained very distinct. 3 James I of England was a regal transplant, and that enables some comparison between two distinct places. While comparative law tends to focus on transplants of legal rules, movement of 1 Charles I was personally involved in the Privy Council's resolution of petitions concerning judicial proceedings about the Forest of Dean, but these proceedings appear to have been private; see Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631-1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, ed. M. C. Questier (Cambridge, 2005), 232 n. 1094. Charles also observed the trial of the earl of Strafford in 1641, but did not preside; J. H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom: The Trial for Treason of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, First Minister to King Charles I, and Last Hope of the English Crown (University, AL, 1974), 65.My thanks to Amy Blakeway and Adelyn Wilson for their assistance on Scottish material. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Cambridge Early-Modern British and Irish History Seminar, the Notre Dame Roundtable on History and Theory in Constitutional Development and the UCL Faculty of Laws Staff Seminar. My thanks to all participants for their comments and suggestions.