Magna Carta continues to compel and confound

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June 8, 2015

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Magna Carta continues to compel and confound

By Peter Singer | June 8, 2015, Monday |

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Fly out of London’s Heathrow Airport and you may pass over a grassy field called Runnymede. Eight hundred years ago this month, it offered a colorful spectacle, dotted with the tents of barons and knights, and the larger pavilion of King John of England, looking like a circus top with the royal standard fluttering above.

Despite the gathering’s pageant-like appearance, the atmosphere was undoubtedly tense. The purpose was to settle a conflict between rebellious barons and their king, a ruler described by a contemporary as “brimful of evil qualities.”

John’s efforts to raise money to regain lost lands in France exceeded the usual taxes and levies that the nobles had accepted from his predecessors. The king seized the estates, and sometimes the person, of wealthy lords or merchants and demanded hefty payments for their release.

If his years of amassing cash had led to victory, John might have got away with his arbitrary methods; but when he was defeated in France, a group of barons rose up against him and captured London. As part of a peace deal brokered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the king accepted the barons’ demands, put to him in a document called Magna Carta, or “the Great Charter.”

What these fighters for justice and freedom take from this 3,500-word document is the brief statements of general principles in response to John’s arbitrary seizure of his subjects’ property and person. In its 39th Chapter, Magna Carta states: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or diseised [dispossessed], or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go against him, nor will we send against him, save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” Chapter 40 states, concisely, another powerful principle: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.”

Modern echo

These two chapters have their modern echo in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which decrees that no state shall deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property “without due process of law” or deny anyone “the equal protection of the laws.”

Yet Magna Carta is not a democratic document. Although it established the requirement of common consent to taxation, that consent was to be obtained from an assembly of earls, barons, bishops, and abbots.

There is nothing in Magna Carta that prevents the enactment and enforcement of unjust laws; but it does elevate the law above the ruler’s will. Unfortunately, that idea still is not accepted in many countries. Moreover, as the continued existence of the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay shows, even among countries that trace their political institutions to Magna Carta, perceived security threats have weakened the requirement that no one be arrested except under the law of the land, and that justice not be delayed.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.

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Magna Carta continues to compel and confound

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