At first I think it’s just another protest. A parade of brightly dressed young women, all wearing sashes to proclaim their cause, marching along the traffic-free road in front of the White House. If you want to protest in Washington DC, this is the place to do it. There’s a half-naked young guy with the puzzling words ‘CHANCEprose.com’ written across his bare chest, and a sign hanging from his shorts that says, ‘We all have our own super-power. Mine is the ability to be annoying.’ There’s a tiny elderly woman apparently living here in a tent decked with signs saying things like, ‘Stop Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.’ Next to her a battered billboard announces, ‘24 hrs a day anti-nuclear peace vigil since 1981 maintained by Concepción & W. Thomas.’ There’s no sign of Concepción herself. She must be on a break.
As the young women start to form up in front of the White House railings, I notice there’s a remarkable uniformity about them. They’re all in tight mid-thigh skirts, look comfortable on 8-inch heels and are sporting the kind of make-up and hairstyling normally seen in ads for beauty products. The cops leaning on their patrol cars, marked ‘Police Secret Service’, turn to watch. Curious as to the exact nature of the protest, I move closer to read the slogan on the sashes. The nearest young woman – auburn hair, a dark blue dress – is taking a selfie with the tall white columns of America’s highest seat of power in the background. It’s only when she lowers her smartphone that I see the words ‘Miss Minnesota’ stretching from her right shoulder down to her left hip. Then along comes Miss Nevada, followed by Miss Alaska who’s chatting to Miss Oregon. And yes, there must be about fifty of them. But what are they doing here? I turn to ask a stout, middle-aged woman (definitely not Miss Anything) who is attempting to marshal them into some sort of alphabetical order.
‘It’s the Miss America Pageant,’ she replies, before instructing her flock, ‘Now guys, get in a line for the camera.’
‘But why the White House?’ I persist.
She takes a cigarette from a silver case, lights it, puffs a plume of smoke over her right shoulder, and replies, ‘They’re here in our nation’s capital for a policy briefing and a session with Women-in-Leadership. To become Miss America,’ she adds, tossing the barely smoked cigarette to the ground then grinding it into the tarmac with a ruthless foot, ‘these ladies have to advocate for their personal platforms.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
And while the camera pans the length of the line, from Miss Alabama to Miss Wyoming, as one, they wave.
So here’s a question. What is it that links attractive young women, the White House and Magna Carta?
The answer is a court case that grabbed headlines around the world, when Magna Carta nearly – and some might say ‘should have’ – brought down the President of the United States himself.
On 6 May 1994, an employee of the state of Arkansas named Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment case against President Bill Clinton. Three years earlier, when Clinton was state governor, she’d been helping at a management conference at the Excelsior Hotel in the state’s capital, Little Rock. Paula Jones claimed in court that a member of Governor Clinton’s security staff approached her and told her that the governor would like to meet her. Minutes later, she took the elevator to Clinton’s hotel suite. There, according to her account, which was disputed in court, Clinton made a series of increasingly aggressive moves, culminating in his dropping his trousers, exposing himself, and then asking her to ‘kiss it’. Ms Jones claimed that she told the governor, ‘I’m not that kind of girl.’
As she left, Clinton stopped her by the door and said, ‘You’re a smart girl, let’s keep this between ourselves.’ A witness reported that she seemed pleased when she left the hotel room, and that anything that happened inside appeared to be consensual.
When the Arkansas judge ruled against Ms Jones, she appealed to a higher court. Clinton and his lawyers then argued that the Jones case would distract him from the important job of being president, and that the trial should be delayed until he was no longer in office. A federal district judge dismissed this defence on the grounds that the president, in a court of law, is no different from any of his fellow citizens, adding by way of justification: ‘It is contrary to our form of government, which asserts, as did the English in the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, that even the sovereign is subject to God and the law.’
There’s no doubt, as we have seen, that Magna Carta was the first written document that placed the king, like his subjects, beneath the law. In 1990s America, Magna Carta did not have the force of law. But here it was being cited by a judge as more than a symbol. It was evidence of time-honoured, fundamental justice.
Like it or not, President Clinton was in the same boat as King John.
The US Supreme Court went on to rule that the case against the president could go ahead. Evidence was brought forward of other sexual indiscretions, including lurid details of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. For only the second time in US history a sitting president was impeached – that is, was put on trial before the Senate. He was not accused of sexual harassment or extramarital affairs, but of lying, i.e. perjury and obstruction of justice. Unlike King John, however, President Clinton managed to get enough of the most powerful magnates in the land to support him: the Democratic party majority in the Senate, voting pretty much on party lines, threw out the charges.
Nevertheless, Magna Carta had played its part in pushing the most powerful man on earth to the edge of ruination.
And this case was no exception. Magna Carta is regularly cited in US courts. More than 900 legal cases have sought guidance from the Great Charter, over 400 of them in the highest court in the land.
The US Supreme Court is housed in a huge neo-classical building next to the US Congress on Capitol Hill. If you go there in the early morning before Washington’s attorneys and judges turn up with their laptop bags and cardboard coffee mugs, you can admire its massive bronze doors, still shut at that time. They’re decorated with embossed images illustrating key events in the development of the rule of law. In the middle of the right portal, there’s a picture of Sir Edward Coke barring King James I from entering the ‘King’s Court’ at Westminster, and thereby asserting the court’s independence. Just below it – in the most prominent position – the founders of America’s highest judicial forum have chosen to show King John granting Magna Carta to the barons.
And the range of such cases has been enormous. In 1940, the Supreme Court relied in part on Magna Carta to overturn death sentences on four young black men whose confessions of murder had been extorted from them by police during five days of terror and isolation. In 1989, it was used to argue against a $6 million fine in a trade monopoly case. The Great Charter was called on in 1991 to prevent a young man being sent to a detention centre, and in 2005 in support of trial by jury. Over the years, Magna Carta has turned up in court cases concerned with private property, commerce, capitalism and slavery – in 1857 the Charter was quoted in defence of the slave owners’ rights! According to at least one analysis, during recent decades, the Great Charter has been cited more and more often in criminal and civil actions in the USA.
But it’s not just during complex arguments in courts of law that Magna Carta makes an appearance. As historian H.D. Hazeltine, notes, ‘The history of Magna Carta in America has a meaning far deeper than the influence of a single constitutional document … its spirit is inherent in the aspirations of the race.’
For the story of how and why the Great Charter has taken such pride of place in the judicial system and at times in the daily lives of Americans, we need to go next to a building exactly halfway between the White House and the Supreme Court. It occupies a block on the corner of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s the US National Archives. The word ‘archives’ – unless you’re an enthusiastic librarian – may prompt you to yawn. But believe me, you should stay awake, because this building is packed with surprises.
I first catch sight of it from the open top of a double-decker hop-on-hop-off bus as we cruise down Constitution Avenue. The bus’s pre-recorded commentary blares out, ‘This temple of a building was constructed to revere the birth certificates of our nation.’ And a temple is what it looks like. Think of the Royal Exchange in London, at the very start of our Magna Carta journey, then triple in size its wide flight of steps, its towering columns and its triangular pediment on top, and you’ll get some idea of the grandeur of the National Archives. I balance down the stairs from the bus’s top deck, and hop off to find those ‘birth certificates’ of a nation.
On the ground floor, directly opposite where all visitors enter the National Archives, there it is, the only exhibit immediately visible. Magna Carta, on permanent display. It’s not of course one of the Great Charters sealed by King John – they’re all in England. But it is an original 1297 Magna Carta, as reissued by Edward I. Some constitutional historians regard this version as more important than the 1215 one, because it was accompanied by a declaration that any decision taken by a judge or royal official which was at odds with Magna Carta ‘shall be undone, and holden for nought’.
The United States National Archives building in Washington DC. It houses the original US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and a 1297 Magna Carta. (by kind permission of US National Archives)
The parchment sits here in a sealed glass case. Just like the Magna Carta we saw in the British Library it’s no bigger than a page of a tabloid newspaper and its continuous, faint tiny brown scratchings, even if we could see them properly, would make no sense because they’re in abbreviated medieval Latin.
I have to wait to get a close look at it, because there’s a young guy, rucksack on his back, bending over studying it. I’m surprised at how long he devotes to it, a good five minutes. So when he steps back, I ask if maybe he’s a specialist in deciphering ancient manuscripts.
‘Oh no,’ he says, smiling. ‘Actually I’ve just graduated in Economics and Business Administration.’
‘So how come you’re so interested in Magna Carta?’ I ask.
‘It was a big deal at school,’ he says. ‘We learn about it in eighth grade and again later in high school.’ I nod approvingly. ‘We’re taught about it as part of the first lessons in American history,’ he goes on. ‘It’s the foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I’ve always been fascinated as to why such a really old document can still be so important.’
‘So have you seen it before?’ I ask.
‘Yes, my folks brought me here when I was a kid,’ he replies. ‘I always remembered it. So I’m just down in DC for the day and thought I’d come and take another look.’
I’m impressed, and I tell him so. He says he’s impressed to meet an Englishman alongside this old English parchment. We laugh and shake hands before parting.
A sign on the wall reads:
Magna Carta remains a powerful symbol
of mankind’s eternal struggle against oppression
I make my way upstairs to the floor above. Here in the centre of the building is a large hall. It’s a cross between a cathedral chancel and the concourse of a very exclusive bank. You enter through gigantic bronze gates. Inside, I find myself in semi-darkness as if the place were lit by candles. At the far side of its vast marbled floor stands a line of what look from a distance like altars. There are three of them. The central one is flanked by uniformed guards. A handful of devotees occasionally whisper to each other, our steps faintly echoing as we move to and fro. Above the altars, the upper walls are covered with long and sumptuous murals depicting what must be the saints of this cult. We are in a shrine to the most hallowed of treasures. The impression is deliberate. As the archives guidebook says: ‘The majestic domed ceiling, rising 70 feet above the floor, and the 40-foot-tall bronze doors contribute to the feelings of awe and reverence experienced by visitors to this magnificent space.’
It’s called the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. It’s not a temple, of course – not in the strictly religious sense, anyway. The saints in the paintings are in fact America’s founding fathers. The altars are display cases. The central one holds the Constitution. To the left is the Declaration of Independence. On the right is the Bill of Rights. The worshippers are, like me, visitors. The guards … well, they are actually guards, overseeing the security of the most revered documents in America.
I make my way over to look closer. I don’t expect to be able to read what’s written on them any better than I could on Magna Carta. That’s certainly so with the Declaration of Independence – it was once kept in a shop window exposed to sunlight for thirty years and is badly faded. The Constitution itself is a little clearer. I step gingerly over to the right, giving a friendly smile to the guard as I pass – his face remains stony – to examine the Bill of Rights. By peering very near to its glass cover, I can decipher some of its faint brown words in slanting copperplate writing.
These then are the ‘birth certificates’ of the American nation. The Constitution is basically a job description. It set out in simple clear language the functions of the three bodies that hold power in the United States – President, Congress and the judiciary. The Bill of Rights is the name given to the ten articles that were attached to the Constitution to define the rights of citizens. Rather confusingly, these articles were called ‘amendments’ though they were additions rather than corrections. It was in framing this document, in 1791, that America’s founding fathers took their inspiration from Magna Carta.
To understand how Latin words on an ancient piece of English parchment came to be at the heart of American law, and in fact at the centre of America’s devotion to liberty, we need to remind ourselves about the labour pains that led to the birth of the nation. They were momentous and bloody events.
The clash between Britain and its American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century was not David versus Goliath. Both had become giants in their own right. By 1759, the British found themselves ruling an empire of which the American colonies formed only one part, as big as any the world had seen since the Romans. That status sometimes led to ill-informed arrogance among Britain’s leaders. The Earl of Chatham remarked: ‘The Americans must be subordinate. This is the Mother Country. They are children. They must obey, and we prescribe.’ Not a statement likely to go down well across the Atlantic. The fact was the Americans now lived in one of the fastest growing and richest places on earth. Intensive immigration and a high birth rate had combined with seemingly endless supplies of land and natural resources to produce in the colonies booming economies and relatively high living standards. The Americans chafed under patronising and oppressive rule from London.
What tipped discontent into war was taxation.
Westminster introduced a tax that applied only to the American colonies. Its very bizarre nature was enough to expose it to ridicule. By the Stamp Act, many printed materials commonly used in America had to be produced on a special paper manufactured in London and embossed with a revenue stamp to show the tax had been paid. These printed materials included not only legal documents but also magazines, newspapers and – puzzlingly – playing cards. To make the whole exercise even more ham-fisted, among those hit by it were two groups of Americans who had every opportunity to whip up a sense of grievance among their fellow countrymen: innkeepers, who had to use the paper in applying for their licences, and journalists. The result was rioting in the streets, usually culminating in a ceremonial bonfire of the stamped paper. One of the special tax collectors, a man named Zachariah Hood, was chased off by a righteous mob in Massachusetts. He rode without stopping till his horse collapsed and died under him. At this period, a new slogan was heard, ‘No taxation without representation.’
Then the rift between the two sides was further deepened by the opposing constitutional arguments they each put forward. In England, following the so-called Bloodless Revolution of 1689, parliamentary democracy rather than Magna Carta increasingly came to be regarded as the ultimate guardian of liberty. The Americans, on the other hand, held that Magna Carta and English common law were the restraint on all arbitrary power, whether that be the king, the House of Lords, or – if it behaved in a despotic fashion – the House of Commons.
In early 1775, more taxes brought more violence. In Massachusetts this amounted to open rebellion, and there was skirmishing between American militiamen and the British redcoats. Massachusetts chose this moment to design a new official seal. It showed a colonist with Magna Carta in his left hand and a sword in his right, ready to fight for his liberties. The other colonies, divided in their opinions and actions on so many matters, also started to rouse themselves against British rule. In the Virginia House of Burgesses, one elected representative, Patrick Henry, decided a bit of theatrics might galvanise opinion. He got down on his knees, imitating a manacled slave, and in a steadily rising voice, intoned, ‘Is life so dear, our peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!’ Then he threw himself flat on the floor, before suddenly jumping to his feet, and shouting, ‘Give me liberty!’ And he made as if he were holding a dagger to his breast, adding, in funereal tones, ‘Or give me death!’
By May, fighting between the colonists and the British was widespread. War had broken out.
One year into that conflict, on 4 July 1776, the thirteen American colonies, after some pushing and shoving, unanimously declared their independence in a document that – unlike Magna Carta – began with a masterful statement of fundamental principle. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ wrote its authors, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ They have been described as the most potent words in American history. However, just like clause 39 of Magna Carta, which had said that free men should not be punished except according to the law, the opening words of the Declaration of Independence too were flawed. Just as ‘free men’ in the 1215 Magna Carta meant a limited section of the population, so did the words ‘all men’ in the Declaration of Independence. It excluded 600,000 black slaves. The matter had been debated by the founding fathers, and to preserve unanimity, it had to be agreed that slaves, though human, were – by some perverse logic – neither created equal nor had the same inalienable rights as free white Americans. It would take more than two centuries of bloody struggle before the Declaration of Independence, like Magna Carta before it, would be reinterpreted to become all-inclusive.
The War of Independence was a war of attrition. It took eight years for the two sides to wear each other down. In the end there was no appetite among the British to fight on, and when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, America achieved her aim and was free of the imperial yoke. Now it had to define how it would govern itself.
The man who more than any other shaped the new US Constitution hardly looked a hero. He was physically frail and, unusually for a politician, rather reticent. But he had the brain of a genius. He understood the opportunity now presented to forge a new political, legal and social order. He was James Madison.
The heart of the new system of government framed by Madison was the separation of powers. In Britain, the three great institutions of the state – the executive arm of government, the lawmakers and the judges – were mingled together in what to outsiders looked like a tangled hotchpotch (and still does). The Lord Chancellor, for instance, sitting as tradition dictates on a sack of wool in the House of Lords, manages to be one of the leaders of the government, a member of the legislature and a prominent judge, all at the same time. Not so in the new American constitution. Madison and his colleagues saw such confusion as a recipe for madness, an invitation for some corrupt leader to take all the reins of power in his hands and to assume absolute authority. Instead under the new American Constitution, the three powers – the executive, that is the President, the legislature in the form of Congress, and the judiciary – would be entirely separate. The force of each one would counterbalance the other two.
James Madison, the frail genius who turned to Magna Carta when framing the American Bill of Rights. (Library of Congress)
But the Constitution said nothing about the rights of individual citizens. And for a while it looked as though they might get overlooked amid the frenzy of tasks facing the government of the new nation. Madison himself even thought that what he called ‘parchment barriers’ against a tyrannical government were unnecessary. But eventually he changed his mind. The man who was known for his shyness then – in the words of one of his contemporaries – ‘hounded his colleagues relentlessly’ till the ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were ratified by Congress in 1781.
Central to the document is the Fifth Amendment, perhaps best known in the phrase ‘Plead the Fifth’ when some politicians is accused of an abuse of office by a Senate Committees, or when a mafia boss faces a criminal trial, and by pleading the Fifth Amendment, they reserve their right not to give testimony against themselves and so refuse to answer questions. But there’s much more to the Fifth Amendment than that. Its final few words state a fundamental comprehensive civil right:
No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
This of course was a repeat of what the thirteen original colonies had, with minor variations in the wording, copied from Magna Carta under the influence of the writings of Sir Edward Coke. It was Coke’s interpretation of the Great Charter too that led to the inclusion in the Bill of Rights of trial by jury, a provision that fines should not be excessive, as well as the right of citizens to join, or leave, an association such as a trade union or a political party, and the right to petition the government without fear of reprisal.
In the late nineteenth century, America’s most celebrated jurist, Judge John Forest Dillon, wrote:
This was not new language, or language of uncertain meaning. It was taken purposely from Magna Carta. It was language not only memorable in its origin, but it had stood for more than five centuries as the classic expression and as the recognized bulwark of the ancient and inherited rights of Englishmen to be secure in their personal liberty and in their possessions … It will hereafter, more fully than at present, be regarded as the American complement of the Great Charter, and be to us – as the Great Charter was and is to England – the source of perennial blessings.
Of course, America’s love affair with Magna Carta does not mean that elective democracy has had no place in the nation’s government. John Smith himself had been elected president of the Jamestown council as early as September 1608, the earliest example of democracy at work in the New World (followed – significantly – eight months later by the earliest example of London overruling the colonists’ wishes, when it, in effect, removed him from office). It is only in the ballot booth that ordinary citizens can choose their leaders. But the American attitude has always been to distrust ‘Washington’, by which they mean the people in power, who can be corrupted. So throughout history, from the Jamestown Charter, through the colonial constitutions to the US Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights, Americans have made pieces of paper rather than institutions the ultimate authority for their civil liberties. And all of these documents have, to a greater or lesser extent, looked to Magna Carta as their model and as their historic justification. The Great Charter runs through the American body politic like a pumping vein.
But that doesn’t wholly explain why Magna Carta has spread beyond the law libraries to become an icon for ordinary Americans. It seems there’s a quality about the Great Charter that answers a deep need in the national consciousness. That something is Magna Carta’s central role as a defence against tyranny. The USA has never had its own Stalin or Hitler. Yet the fear – not just of tyranny but of any overmighty government – runs through the national psyche like a recurring nightmare. Throughout their history, Americans have felt the need to be vigilant for the merest sign that despotism may be taking root. To this day, the state flag and official seal of Virginia still have an image of the figure of Virtue with her foot on the neck of Tyranny.
Part of the reason for this obsession dates to the American experience during the struggle for independence. British imperial tyranny almost triumphed then. That was a lesson, and was the logic behind Madison’s separation of powers in the constitution itself, so that an over-ambitious, self-serving president could be checked by an elected Congress and by an independent judiciary.
This obsession has its roots in what’s sometimes called ‘the American Dream’, the ideal (that often falls short in real life, but is a national aspiration nevertheless) that even a baby born in a log cabin can grow up to be president or a millionaire. Such values as self-reliance and the worth of the individual – forged in Jamestown and the rest of America’s pioneering settlements – could be cramped by an interfering government, and would certainly be killed stone dead by an absolute dictator.
This sentiment can surface in the most innocent of circumstances. At election time, for instance, when candidates campaign against Big Government. That’s partly of course about a reluctance to pay taxes, but it also reflects a worry that government might become so powerful that its citizens’ liberties would be threatened.
But fear of tyranny can also, on occasions, burst forth with violence in the darkest moments of America’s history. This is exactly what happened just a ten-minute walk from the National Archives, on 10th Street, five blocks east of the White House. Just along from the Hard Rock Café, there’s a small playhouse called Ford’s Theatre. A billboard outside advertises today’s production, Driving Miss Daisy, a gentle drama about race and friendship. Visitors are allowed inside during those hours between productions and rehearsals. The auditorium is small and charming, its white stuccoed walls, red velvet seats and brass railings, all kept much as they were on the evening of 14 April 1865 when one of those dark moments in history occurred.
It was five days after the end of the American Civil War, a conflict that had seen the worst casualty rate per serving soldier of any war the world has ever known. It had rent the nation in two. That evening, Ford’s Theatre had famous guests in its audience. President Abraham Lincoln, the first lady, and their friends Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris were watching a performance of the play Our American Cousin.
At a little after 10.25 on that evening, a celebrated actor and Confederate supporter named John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box. In one hand he held a .44 calibre Derringer pistol, and in the other a knife. He shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Then as Major Rathbone stepped forward, Booth stabbed him. Eyewitnesses say he then leaped on to the stage. Once in front of the footlights, he raised his knife and shouted to a shocked audience, ‘Sic semper tyrannis’, the words attributed to Brutus when he killed Caesar and roughly translated as ‘it is ever thus for tyrants’.
From the circle, where I’m standing, I get a clear view of the presidential box, to the right of the stage. Since that day it has remained empty. This afternoon it’s draped in two huge Stars and Stripes flags. It dominates the little auditorium. From the balcony of the box down to the boards below I would estimate to be a 15-foot drop. The theatre’s guide who is standing nearby can see my puzzlement.
‘That was one fearsome leap,’ I say to her. ‘Did he really do that?’
‘Oh yes,’ she replies, ‘Booth was a well-known athlete. And I guess his adrenaline had kicked in too.’
Lincoln died the following morning at a house across the road. Booth escaped, but twelve days later was caught and shot dead by a soldier.
The assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 in a box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. On the left, Major Henry Rathbone steps forward to restrain the killer. Next to him his fiancée, Clara Harris, alongside the First Lady. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, has a knife as well as the gun. After shooting the president, he stabs Rathbone before leaping onto the stage. (Library of Congress)
This was perhaps the most extreme example of that American fear of tyranny. But it’s far from unique. In total, four American presidents have been assassinated. There have been attempts on the lives of six others.
We may regard it as a vile slander to label Abraham Lincoln a tyrant. His memorial in Washington – one of the most famous landmarks in the world – is inscribed with the words, ‘In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined for ever.’ Nevertheless, in the heated era of the Civil War, ‘tyrant’ was what his enemies branded him. So perhaps we can understand that violent attacks on presidents and a reverence for Magna Carta have something in common. Although they’re at the opposite extremes of what is acceptable in American society, both stem from the same sentiment: a wariness of overmighty political leaders. It was this sentiment that made the original thirteen colonies adopt the Great Charter as the model for their constitutions, and it was the same sentiment that inspired James Madison when he drafted the Bill of Rights. True or not, Magna Carta in the United States has been the seen as the first constitutional weapon to defeat tyranny. It’s a sentiment that permeates the everyday lives of Americans.
Today in the twenty-first-century United States, Magna Carta surfaces all over the place, in TV interviews, Congressional debates, in high school and college curricula, in newspaper articles. The imprisonment without trial of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay has brought a slew of recent references to the Great Charter. On 14 November 2013, a columnist in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote:
Once rights are eroded, the slope is steep and slippery. The idea that a fair trial is central to all other rights was recognized more the 2000 years ago in the Roman Republic, in the 13th century in the Magna Carta, and again in the U.S. constitution. The denial of a fair trial to anyone today is a threat to all of us in the United States in the future.
If we count the phrase ‘due process’ as a reference to Magna Carta – which is a direct quote by the Fifth Amendment from the 1354 reissued Great Charter – then barely a second goes by but that someone somewhere in the USA isn’t using Magna Carta to challenge their boss when he threatens to fire them, to complain about some over-officious bureaucrat, or to object to a parking fine.
From defender of the privileges of a handful of feudal aristocrats, to the watchword of Mr, Mrs and Ms Middle America, what a wondrous journey Magna Carta has trodden.
But what of the Great Charter’s future? Can it sustain its position as the bastion of freedom and justice, not just in the USA, but in the country of its birth and in the rest of the world? It’s time to take stock back at the place where the Great Charter was born one June day eight centuries ago.