Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, PC (1 December 1690 – 6 March 1764) was an English lawyer and politician who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain.

Through the Earl of Macclesfield's influence with the Duke of Newcastle Yorke entered parliament in 1719 as member for Lewes, and was appointed solicitor-general, with a knighthood, in 1720, although he was then a barrister of only four years standing.

Although in his youth he contributed to The Spectator over the signature Philip Homebred, he seems early to have abandoned all care for literature, and he has been reproached by Lord Campbell and others with his neglect of art and letters.

The prosecution of Christopher Layer for treason as a Jacobite raised Yorke's reputation as a forensic orator; and in 1723, having already become attorney-general, he passed through the House of Commons the bill of pains and penalties against Francis Atterbury.

Hardwicke's political importance was greatly increased by his move to the House of Lords, where the incompetency of Newcastle threw on the chancellor the duty of defending the measures of the government.

After Culloden he presided at the trial of the Scottish Jacobite peers, his conduct of which, though judicially impartial, was neither dignified nor generous; and he must be held partly responsible for the severity meted out to the rebels, and especially for the executions on obsolete attainders of Charles Radclyffe and (in 1753) of Archibald Cameron of Locheil.

Hardwicke supported Chesterfield's reform of the calendar in 1751; in 1753 his bill for legalizing the naturalization of Jews in England had to be dropped on account of the popular clamour it excited; but he successfully carried a Marriage Act which became the basis of subsequent legislation.

In 1736 the King's Bench, under his presidency, delivered the seminal judgment in Middleton v. Crofts 2 Atk 650, which held that canons made in the provincial clergy convocations could not, by themselves, bind the lay faithful.

His influence was powerful in obliterating the traditions of the judicial bench under the Stuart monarchy, and in establishing the modern conception of the duties and demeanour of English judges.