Edward Jenks, FBA (1861–1939) was an English jurist, and noted writer on law and its place in history.

He was the principal editor of A Digest of English Civil Law (1905–1917) which led to receipt of an honorary doctorate from Paris.

In the preface to the first instalment of the 1905-17 edition, Jenks mentioned that the work had resulted from a suggestion of the President of the Berlin Society for Comparative Jurisprudence and Political Economy for a statement of English law, intended by the Society as the first of its projected series of handbooks on the legal systems of modern civilized communities, it being the Society's intention to produce a series of works to be modelled after the pattern of the German Civil Code which came into force throughout the German Empire on 1 January 1900, but departing from the arrangement of the German Code as considered advisable.

Edward Jenks is most famous for his iconoclastic essay The Myth of Magna Carta published in the Independent Review in 1904.

[3] Jenks argued against Stubbs's proposition that Magna Carta was the first corporate act of the nation roused to the sense of its unity, when the people of the towns and villages ranged themselves on the side of the barons against the king for the first time since the Norman Conquest.