HAPPY BIRTHDAY
PAUL CRAIG ROBERT’S
Monday, June 15, 2015, {was} the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. In his book, Magna Carta, J.C.
Holt, professor of medieval history, University of Cambridge, notes that three of the chapters of this
ancient document still stand on the English Stature Book and that so much of what survives of the Great
Charter is “concerned with individual liberty,” which “is a reflexion of the quality of the original act of
1215.”
In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke used the Great Charter of the Liberties to establish the supremacy
of Parliament, the representative of the people, as the origin of law.
A number of legal scholars have made the irrelevant point that the Magna Carta protected rights of the
Church, nobles, and free men who were not enserfed, a small percentage of the population in the early
13th century. We hear the same about the US Constitution–it was something the rich did for themselves.
I have no sympathy for debunking human achievements that, in the end, gave ordinary people liberty.
At Runnymede in 1215 no one but the armed barons had the power and audacity to make King John submit to law. The rule of law, not the rule of the sovereign or of the executive branch in Washington acceded
to by a cowardly and corrupt Congress and Supreme Court, is a human achievement that grew out of the
Magna Carta over the centuries, with ups and downs of course.
Blackstone’s Commentaries in 1759 fed into the American Revolution and gave us the US Constitution
and the Bill of Rights.
The Geneva Conventions extended the rule of law to the international arena.
Beginning with the Clinton Administration and rapidly accelerating with the George W. Bush and
Obama regimes and Tony Blair in England, the US and UK governments have run roughshod over their
accountability to law.