11-04-2004, 04:46 PM
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Confirmed User
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 1,844
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Quote:
Originally posted by hagbard
I'm with you on many points but dont critisize him for the Zulu fiasco when you compare the crapa carta to the constitution of the US. Magna carta was solely and completely for the lords and did not give the working class jack squat. Also, it was the 1600's before anyone BUT the barons noticed the thing.
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I'll give you that it wasn't a great comparison, but then what i referred to was written 800 years ago. However......
Quote:
When Englishmen left their homeland to establish colonies in the New World, they brought with them charters guaranteeing that they and their heirs would "have and enjoy all liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects." Scant generations later, when these American colonists raised arms against their mother country, they were fighting not for new freedoms but to preserve liberties that dated to the 13th century.
When representatives of the young republic of the United States gathered to draft a constitution, they turned to the legal system they knew and admired--English common law as evolved from Magna Carta. The conceptual debt to the great charter is particularly obvious: the American Constitution is "the Supreme Law of the Land," just as the rights granted by Magna Carta were not to be arbitrarily canceled by subsequent English laws.
This heritage is most clearly apparent in our Bill of Rights. The fifth amendment guarantees
No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
and the sixth states
...the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.
Written 575 years earlier, Magna Carta declares
No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice.
In 1957 the American Bar Association acknowledged the debt American law and constitutionalism had to Magna Carta and English common law by erecting a monument at Runnymede. Yet, as close as Magna Carta and American concepts of liberty are, they remain distinct. Magna Carta is a charter of ancient liberties guaranteed by a king to his subjects; the Constitution of the United States is the establishment of a government by and for "We the People."
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http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall...s/magna_carta/ |
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