Magna Carta, and Other AddressesGuthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
History
Magna Carta, and Other Addresses
Guthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
Constitutional law -- United States
Finally, it may be of interest to notice the sanction and security
devised for enforcing the covenants of Magna Carta. A body or tribunal
of twenty-five barons, called executors, was created by chapter
sixty-one, who were to "be bound with all their might, to observe
and hold, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties we have
granted and confirmed to them," and who were to have power to compel
the king himself, even by force, to keep the promises he had made.
The clause providing this security or legal sanction was crude, but
it was not necessarily an impracticable innovation. Although the
plan utterly failed, it remained of immense value in principle. That
principle established the right of the subjects to compel the king of
England to obey a body of fixed laws outside and beyond his will; it
justified revolution for just cause, and it inspired our forefathers
in their struggle against George III. The influence of this idea upon
public sentiment as justifying revolution, particularly during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cannot well be over-estimated.
The ineffectiveness of this provision of Magna Carta served also to
demonstrate the futility of such a tribunal and security, and to lead
the English people to look thereafter solely to the courts of justice
and to parliament for the protection of their rights and liberties.
The founders of our own republican governments may have been warned
by the failure of this sanction that it would be unwise to create any
political body with power to enforce constitutional provisions, and
it may have been for this reason that they left the enforcement of
constitutional limitations and the protection of the individual and
minorities to an independent non-political forum composed of impartial
judges learned in the law and meaning "to observe it well," according
to the spirit of Magna Carta.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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