The Rule of Law

It was a fine English June day, over eight hundred years ago, that the barons of England confronted King John in the meadows of Runnymede, a green paradise on the banks of the River Thames. There were pomp and panoply and circumstances, but at base it was all business. The almost unanaimous barons were fed up with King John raising taxes and levies for his vendetta wars, and they had delivered him an ultimatum: agree to limits on your authority, or we’ll find another king. John did not like it one bit, but he had little choice. He signed (or rather, sealed) the document that was put before him. (In those days many noblemen sealed documents because they did not know how to write.)

The Great Charter (Magna Carta) became the foundation of our democracies, a written contract between the sovereign and his people, that even the King had to follow some rules. To be sure, the initial deal was exclusively between the King and his barons, but the language was wide and open and over time was understood to apply to all of the King’s subjects, no matter how humble. The King had to follow the rules, and so did everyone else.

Principles which today we take for granted, such as “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land” were, for the first time in modern history, enshrined into the primary law of the nation.

To be sure, the millions of landless serfs felt little immediate relief, and the Pope immediately denounced the Magna Carta as heresy. King John died the next year, and the royals and the barons tussled back and forth for more than a century, but the Great Charter stood, and grew in importance. Ultimately the Magna Carta became the bedrock for the great Bill of Rights (1689), the American Constitution, and the constitutions of the countries of the Commonwealth. Over the years, lawyers drew such critical doctrines as habeas corpus, prohibition, and mandamus, principles which told the state it could not do as it wished without answering to the people.

Sadly, the notion of the “rule of law” still remains a minority doctrine universally, and remains under constant attack. Those who “know what’s good for us”, those who would profit from our servitude, and those who just find democracy a nuisance, all are happy to rip up the Magna Carta and hand total authority back to King John to pursue his wars and his whims at our expense. This is no abstract legal concept.