A centuries-old promise:
No free man shall be taken or imprisoned…or exiled, or in any way ruined,…except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.
There’s irony in that pledge, given that we’re witnessing men and women, including a physician at Brown University, summarily scooped up and deported without hearings.
The guarantee of due process is an American constitutional right, but the vow quoted above was adopted long before our nation was born.
As most of us learned in junior high, during Easter week of 1215, a group of English barons, seething with resentment over the oppressive policies of King John, drew up a charter designed to assure them certain freedoms.
When John refused to sign, the barons renounced their allegiance to him and marched on London, capturing the city and convincing the besieged monarch that this was a deal he couldn’t refuse.
On June 15, John met the barons in a meadow near the Thames River and pressed his elaborate seal onto Magna Carta, the Great Charter that guaranteed numerous civil rights.
The document of 63 paragraphs has endured for 810 years as the historic rock of English law, and hence, as a basis of our own cherished – and threatened – civil liberties in America.
Couched in medieval argot, the Magna Carta is no easy read today. But ever since its creation, it has inspired those who value liberty, since its principles establish that no one–not even a king–is above the law.
Winston Churchill put it succinctly when he said the Magna Carta was meant to preserve government strength while preventing its perversion “by a tyrant, or a fool.”
Hmmm – some food for contemporary thought there.
Churchill’s advice was to defend “in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man…which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus…find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.”
English judge Alfred Denning once described the Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all time – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
The charter included assurances that chosen officials would be those “that know the law of the realm and are minded to observe it well.”
The intent of that vow was of concern recently to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned against any decisions encouraging regimes “where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.”
The barons of long ago wrung from their king this vow:
“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.”
Had those English rebels extracted such a promise from our current would-be regent, one wonders if, this far into his term, they’d be grasping the hard and undeniable truth that they got snookered.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
