WHY MAGNA CARTA STILL MATTERS

The struggle for civil and legal rights has turned on interconnected problems of citizenship and justice, on the question of who is entitled to citizenship rights and who gets to determine what those rights are.

Socrates’ most formidable opponent is the well-known teacher and orator, Thrasymachus, who argues that justice is “the interest of the stronger” (in other words, might-makes-right).

For his part, Socrates replies rather cleverly that there is a demonstrable good in being just and an evident bad in being otherwise; thus, justice must be something that is beyond the narrow interest of one person, no matter how powerful.

Both ideas lingered well beyond the days of classical Athens such that almost a thousand years later, the medieval English were embroiled in a conflict that brought both ideas of justice to the forefront.

The occasion was a series of wars King John of England (1166-1216) had been fighting to regain land lost in France and that had traditionally been claimed by England’s kings.

To finance his wars, John leaned heavily on the landed nobility in England and used arbitrary force to extract their wealth.

This heavy-handed approach prompted the barons to wage civil war against their king, which they eventually won in 1215, compelling John’s administrators to affix his seal to a remarkable document, the Magna Carta.

Whereas victory in war has historically meant the winning of territories and resources, and other spoils, what was won here was an idea enshrined in letters on parchment.

While much of what is contained in the Magna Carta is now long superseded in English constitutional law, its essence remains and in fact, is the cornerstone of all world democracies and an essential precondition for human rights.

What was won with the Magna Carta was recognition of the “rule of law” – the simple idea that where law is established, no single person is outside of its bounds, not even the most powerful.

Democracies are best able to ensure the preservation and perpetuation of the rule of law.

Despite their evident flaws, democracies promise constitutional continuity, where autocracies run by authoritarians can change constitutions at will, without fear of punishment. Indeed, the military and the courts are often coopted in such countries.

Nothing is more opposed to the spirit of the Magna Carta than rule by edict, and under such a situation, individual rights are meaningless.

WHY THE PETITION OF RIGHT STILL MATTERS

Over four hundred years later, a similar quarrel rocked England.

This time the new king, Charles I (1600-1649), found himself running afoul of Parliament.

Keep in mind that the Magna Carta’s assertion that no person was above the law had, in the intervening centuries, done much to modify the relationship between the crown and the people over whom the monarch ruled.

It followed from the Magna Carta, for example, that the use of royal power had to be lawful; it could not simply be arbitrary.

When Charles I came to power, he, like John I four hundred years earlier,

needed money to wage war. This time the enemy was Spain.

With Magna Carta long in effect, Charles needed Parliament’s consent to impost new taxes to finance his war, which it granted initially; however, when Parliament began complaining that the funds were being misappropriated for Charles’s personal use, Parliament soon balked.

Charles lost the political battle over these issues when the House of Lords, one of the two houses of Parliament (the other was the Commons), broke with him and sided with his opponents in the Commons.

Reminiscent of John’s grudging capitulation in 1215, Charles was compelled to affix his seal and assent to the Petition of Right in 1628, which outlawed the aforementioned practices.

The significance of the Petition of Rights is considerable.
First, it re-asserted quite plainly the principle of the rule of law.

Second, it set out in written language, like the Magna Carta, a kind of code of conduct for governments, a set of civil and legal rights comprising a political settlement that would become further entrenched as core features of the English constitution.

Third, it would influence subsequent codes or “bills” or “charters” of rights, including England’s own Bill of Rights (1689), the US Bill of Rights (1789-91), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Citizen (1789), the UDHR (1948), and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982).