This year, there are several celebrations in Great Britain for the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, a peace treaty between King John and 25 barons rebelling over taxes. Why should those of us living in modern United States 800 years later care about King John and those barons? The answer is that anyone who cares about democracy should because the Magna Carta is the foundation of modern democracy. At its heart, the Magna Carta provides for individual, fundamental rights and the proposition that no one is above the law, not even the king. In other words, might does not automatically equal right in the eyes of the law. Even women’s rights, albeit in a small way, are considered in the Magna Carta which includes a provision that a widow cannot not be forced to remarry without her consent.
It appears from history and literature that the importance of the Magna Carta was not recognized for quite some time. Shakespeare did not even mention the Magna Carta or the rebellious noblemen in his play The Life and Death of King John. With time, however, reference to the principles of the Magna Carta can be seen in the documents that are the infrastructure of democracy and freedom throughout the world such as Gandhi’s farewell letter published when he left South Africa in 1914, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, Mandela’s 1964 speech while on trial for sabotage and the United States’ Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. In fact, the Magna Carta is so instrumental to democracy in the United States that in 1976 Great Britain lent the United States one of four surviving originals for our bicentennial celebrations. A replica of the original is still on display in the United States Capitol Crypt in Washington D.C.