It was originally established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and politically prominent people sufficiently powerful that ordinary courts might hesitate to convict them of their crimes.

[3]: 520 In modern times, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings, no due process rights to those accused, and secretive proceedings are sometimes metaphorically called "star chambers".

Both forms recur throughout the fifteenth century, with Sterred Chambre last attested as appearing in the Supremacy of the Crown Act 1534 (establishing the English monarch as head of the Church in England).

[3] The origin of the name has usually been explained as first recorded by John Stow, writing in his Survey of London (1598), who noted "this place is called the Star Chamber, at the first all the roofe thereof was decked with images of starres gilted".

"[7] Other etymological speculations mentioned by Blackstone include the derivation from Old English steoran (steer) meaning "to govern"; as a court used to punish cozenage (in Latin: crimen stellionatus); or that the chamber was full of windows.

From this time forward, the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon for bringing actions against those who opposed the policies of King Henry VIII, his ministers and his parliament.

On 17 October 1632, the Court of Star Chamber banned all "news books" because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years' War in England was unfair.

[16] The Star Chamber became notorious for judgments favourable to the king, for example when Archbishop Laud had William Prynne branded on both cheeks through its agency in 1637 for seditious libel.

Although it was initially popular with private litigants, under the Stuarts it developed the same reputation for harsh and arbitrary proceedings as its parent court, and during the political confusion of the 1640s, it disappeared.

[18] In the early 1900s, Edgar Lee Masters commented:[19] In the Star Chamber the council could inflict any punishment short of death, and frequently sentenced objects of its wrath to the pillory, to whipping and to the cutting off of ears.

The press and some civil servants under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) revived the term for private ministerial meetings at which disputes between the Treasury and high-spending departments were resolved.

[26] In March 2019, the European Research Group formed its own "Star Chamber" to pass judgement on Theresa May's then proposed Brexit deal, recommending that MPs should not back it.

[27][28] On 29 December 2020, the ERG's Star Chamber gave a similar verdict on Boris Johnson's recently agreed EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, but on this occasion recommended that their members vote for it because the deal was "consistent with the restoration of UK sovereignty".

[29] The historical abuses of the Star Chamber are considered to be some of the reasons, along with English common law precedent, behind the protections against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

[30] The meaning of "compelled testimony" under the Fifth Amendment – i.e., the conditions under which a defendant is allowed to "plead the Fifth" to avoid self-incrimination – is thus often interpreted via reference to the inquisitorial methods of the Star Chamber.