Magna Carta’s Lasting Significance | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Andy Taylor, who is a professor of political science at the School of Public and International Affairs for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     I recently returned from the United Kingdom, where there's much talk of historical commemorations.

    This year marks the 50th anniversary of Churchill's death, the 70th of the victory in World War II, the 100th of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign during World War I, the 200th of Napoleon's ultimate demise at Waterloo, and the 600th of Henry V's resounding defeat of much larger French forces at Agincourt.

    Interestingly, one event that was less a part of my conversations with family, friends, and colleagues was the signing of Magna Carta, or "The Great Charter of the Liberties," that was undertaken by King John and a couple dozen nobles at Runnymede, near Windsor, on June 15, 1215.

    To many Brits, the Magna Carta is a dusty medieval document written in impenetrable old English prose. In fact, as many Americans understand, it is something much more important.

    The document was essentially a peace treaty between the widely unpopular John - an adulterer and despot who had lost the prized possession of Normandy, tussled with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and subjected his countrymen to high taxes - and a group of barons backed by the French and Scots.

    Constituting a series of accusations and demands of the king, it reads a little like the second two-thirds of the Declaration of Independence. But like that document, it also contains a short series of important principles, maxims that the monarch agreed to recognize and that were reissued and accepted regularly by the Crown until part of the charter was codified into English law in 1297.

    Although most of its individual components no longer are valid, the document remains to the current day a central feature - many consider it the wellspring - of the country's common law tradition and "unwritten" constitution.

    Magna Carta seems especially alive and well in North Carolina. It was the subject of an     event held by the John Locke Foundation in June. On the opening day of this year's state legislative session, Rep. Paul Stam, speaker pro tem of the N.C. House, accepted his position with a very interesting six-minute speech about the document.

    In his remarks, Stam focused on some of Magna Carta's most interesting components, including its embrace of free commerce and religious liberty. The charter guarantees the unimpeded movement of merchants and protects them from "all evil tolls." It proclaims the English church free of monarchical control.

    Yet Magna Carta should not be understood as a republican document. It neither deposed nor deterred John, although he did die the following year as his civil war with the barons raged on. It is clearly an artifact of its time and place. There is language on the rights of widows to remain unmarried and about unpaid debts to Jews, as Christians were prohibited from charging interest in the Middle Ages.

    Even so, two contributions remain crucial. First, as Stam also described, Magna Carta constitutes a shackling of monarchical - or executive - power. This is the first time that the Crown had been encumbered in this way.

    Much of this radical language was stripped by Magna Carta's reissuances, but the principle of limited executive power and legislative rights remained. For example, the king was forced to accept outside representation onto his Great Council, the prototype of what was to become Parliament in the 14th century.

    Second, and related, it established the idea that a set of enumerated rules can bind human behavior, even that of a society's rulers. It is these fundamental laws that are sovereign, not the individuals who govern at a particular point in time - regardless of the legitimacy of their hold on office.

    There are also specific clauses in Magna Carta that should be familiar to Americans today. The right to legal due process described in the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution is echoed in clause 39: "No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised [sic], outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."

    The language that immediately follows, "To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice," is reminiscent of the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment.

    It is a great shame that most of the United Kingdom let the anniversary slide with little more than a perfunctory inquisitiveness - the commemorative event at Runnymede was attended by the queen and prime minister but was filled largely with Americans.

    Magna Carta deserves everyone's attention, not least so that we can be reminded periodically of the critical ideas of the rule of law, liberty, separation of powers, and checks and balances, ideas that took deep root in the New World with our revolution and our own great charter, the American Constitution.