Magna Carta: Eight Centuries of Liberty

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/magna-carta-eight-centuries-of-liberty-1432912022

[B-Man]

FTA:

 

It takes a real act of imagination to see how transformative this concept must have been. The law was no longer just an expression of the will of the biggest guy in the tribe. Above the king brooded something more powerful yet—something you couldn’t see or hear or touch or taste but that bound the sovereign as surely as it bound the poorest wretch in the kingdom. That something was what Magna Carta called “the law of the land.”

 

This phrase is commonplace in our language. But think of what it represents. The law is not determined by the people in government, nor yet by clergymen presuming to interpret a holy book. Rather, it is immanent in the land itself, the common inheritance of the people living there.

 

The idea of the law coming up from the people, rather than down from the government, is a peculiar feature of the Anglosphere. Common law is an anomaly, a beautiful, miraculous anomaly. In the rest of the world, laws are written down from first principles and then applied to specific disputes, but the common law grows like a coral, case by case, each judgment serving as the starting point for the next dispute. In consequence, it is an ally of freedom rather than an instrument of state control. It implicitly assumes residual rights.

 

And indeed, Magna Carta conceives rights in negative terms, as guarantees against state coercion. No one can put you in prison or seize your property or mistreat you other than by due process. This essentially negative conception of freedom is worth clinging to in an age that likes to redefine rights as entitlements—the right to affordable health care, the right to be forgotten and so on.

 

It is worth stressing, too, that Magna Carta conceived freedom and property as two expressions of the same principle. The whole document can be read as a lengthy promise that the goods of a free citizen will not be arbitrarily confiscated by someone higher up the social scale. Even the clauses that seem most remote from modern experience generally turn out, in reality, to be about security of ownership.

 

 

 

 

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[unbillievable]

Taxes are the loophole that allows the government to confiscate your property without due process.

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/bump a day late

 

June 15th 1215

 

Happy 800th

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

Excellent article that is unafraid to tout the historic exceptionalism of the english speaking world.

[B-Man]

Liberal law professor Thomas Ginsburg in the NY Times, “Stop Revering Magna Carta.”

 

One clause prevents Jews from charging interest on a debt held by an underage heir. Another limits women’s ability to bear witness to certain homicides. . . .

 

In r

eality, Magna Carta was a result of an intra-elite struggle, in

which the nobles were chiefly concerned with their own privileges. When they referred to the judgment of one’s peers, for example, they were not thinking about a jury trial. . . . The reference to one’s peers meant that nobles could not be tried by commoners, who might include judges appointed by the king. . . .

 

Magna Carta has everything going for it to be venerated in the United States: It is old, it is English and, because no one has actually read the text, it is easy to invoke to fit current needs. . . . Tea Party websites regularly invoke it in the battle against Obamacare.

 

 

So basically, in the eyes of liberals/progressives, the Magna Carta is just like the US Constitution: An over-revered document tainted, as liberal law professor Louis Michael Seidman asserted (also in the NY Times), by “archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

 

 

 

With attitudes like this it’s little wonder we are presently experiencing a crisis in respect for, and concomitant stability of, the rule of law.

 

 

 

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