"The Great Charter of 1215 has gone through cycles of veneration and dismissal: dismissal as a carve-up of power between a weak king and his belligerent barons; veneration as the historic source of our freedoms. The truth may be that it is both.
The one thing Magna Carta is not is a source of hard law. If it were, access to justice and trial by jury would be guaranteed to everyone, and trial delays would be unknown.
If, however, instead of peering at the document through...
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"The Great Charter of 1215 has gone through cycles of veneration and dismissal: dismissal as a carve-up of power between a weak king and his belligerent barons; veneration as the historic source of our freedoms. The truth may be that it is both.
The one thing Magna Carta is not is a source of hard law. If it were, access to justice and trial by jury would be guaranteed to everyone, and trial delays would be unknown.
If, however, instead of peering at the document through the prism of the present, you consider what has happened over the intervening eight centuries, the true role of Magna Carta begins to emerge: the nourishment of a consensus that no power stands outside law, and that there exist fundamental rights which no authority is entitled to abrogate.
To say this is, of course, to say everything and nothing: everything, because in one grand sweep it encapsulates the entirety of the rule of law; nothing, because until you know what power, and what law, and what rights are meant, you are talking in a void.
But it is these questions which give life and purpose to the law. They form part of the never-ending contest between the sweeping claims of power and the autonomy of that most vulnerable of minorities, the minority of one."
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