indago
06-15-2015, 07:17 AM
Journalist Sarah Lyall wrote for The New York Times 14 June 2015:
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On Monday, Magna Carta’s 800th birthday is to be observed with an extravagant ceremony in Runnymede, the meadow near Windsor where King John of England capitulated to the barons’ demands and affixed his royal seal to the original document all those years ago. ...The event will feature, among other things, a group of 500 American lawyers traveling with the American Bar Association, a host of England’s foremost jurists and scholars and — as a sign of how far monarchs have come since medieval times — Queen Elizabeth II, attending not on sufferance, but of her own free will. “The events of 800 years ago marked the commencement of a major undertaking in human history,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a recent address. The renowned English judge Lord Denning called Magna Carta “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
Amid all the celebrating, the years of planning, of conferences, exhibits, speeches, papers, symposia and encomia extolling Magna Carta, it might seem churlish to take another view. But there are some legal scholars who believe that the charter is actually not such a big deal. Our adulation of it, they say, comes from what we believe it to have been in hindsight — not what it was at the time.
...Almost immediately after agreeing to it, King John prevailed on the pope to annul it.
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article (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/world/europe/magna-carta-still-posing-a-challenge-at-800.html?ref=todayspaper)
There is a great movie concerning what happened after the Magna Carta
IRONCLAD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233301/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_31)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjf0XCtBdVQ
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On Monday, Magna Carta’s 800th birthday is to be observed with an extravagant ceremony in Runnymede, the meadow near Windsor where King John of England capitulated to the barons’ demands and affixed his royal seal to the original document all those years ago. ...The event will feature, among other things, a group of 500 American lawyers traveling with the American Bar Association, a host of England’s foremost jurists and scholars and — as a sign of how far monarchs have come since medieval times — Queen Elizabeth II, attending not on sufferance, but of her own free will. “The events of 800 years ago marked the commencement of a major undertaking in human history,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a recent address. The renowned English judge Lord Denning called Magna Carta “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
Amid all the celebrating, the years of planning, of conferences, exhibits, speeches, papers, symposia and encomia extolling Magna Carta, it might seem churlish to take another view. But there are some legal scholars who believe that the charter is actually not such a big deal. Our adulation of it, they say, comes from what we believe it to have been in hindsight — not what it was at the time.
...Almost immediately after agreeing to it, King John prevailed on the pope to annul it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
article (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/world/europe/magna-carta-still-posing-a-challenge-at-800.html?ref=todayspaper)
There is a great movie concerning what happened after the Magna Carta
IRONCLAD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233301/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_31)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjf0XCtBdVQ