Liberty, Democracy
& the Social Contract
“The true democrat is he who with purely nonviolent
means defends his liberty and, therefore, his country’s
and ultimately that of the whole of mankind”
- Mahatma Gandhi
In the early thirteenth century, in order to keep the
throne, King John of England signed into law the
Magna Carta. He did so at the behest of a group of
barons and powerful noblemen who could no longer
countenance a regime in which the rights of men
could be usurped with the whim of a single man,
namely the king.
“No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or
disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will
we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the
lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the
land”.
- Article 39, Magna Carta, 1215.
Thus, it was enshrined into law that the life, liberty
or property of free subjects of the king could not
arbitrarily be taken away. This crucial document
begot the seeds of due process from which the
jurisprudence of all civilised jurisdictions has grown.
Hollywood has made us all very familiar with the
Miranda rights – those four declarative statements,
followed by a question;
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