Magna Carta

No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Editorial note. Magna Carta emerged from a baronial revolt against King John's fiscal and judicial abuses. Sealed at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, it was annulled by Pope Innocent III within ten weeks and reissued after John's death by the regency of Henry III in 1216 and 1217. The definitive text is the 1225 reissue, confirmed by Edward I in 1297 and thereafter treated by English courts as a statute of Parliament.

Editorial note. The charter's purpose is to impose legal limits upon royal prerogative. It confirms customary liberties, prescribes due process for deprivations of person and property, guarantees access to the King's courts, and forbids the sale, denial, or delay of justice.

Editorial note. The operative principle of chapter 29 is that no freeman may be deprived of life, liberty, or property except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Coke's Second Institute glossed this phrase as "due process of law," and the American Framers received the gloss unchanged.

Editorial note. The charter binds the Crown in its dealings with freemen; its protections were later understood to run to every subject. Its guarantee of due process reaches every prosecution, disseisin, outlawry, and forfeiture undertaken by governmental authority.

Editorial note. Magna Carta is the fountainhead of the Petition of Right (1628), the Bill of Rights (1689), the state declarations of rights of 1776–1780, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Its due-process phrase is textually preserved in U.S. Const. amend. V and U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1.

Editorial note. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly identified Magna Carta as the historical source of American due process, see Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 59 U.S. (18 How.) 272, 276 (1856); Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 521–24 (1884); Klopfer v. North Carolina, 386 U.S. 213, 223–24 (1967).

Editorial note. The charter was confirmed by successive English monarchs in the confirmationes cartarum and read publicly in each shire twice yearly. Coke's Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1642) reoriented Magna Carta from a feudal grant to a general charter of English liberty, and that reading crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth-century colonial charters.

Editorial note. Four principles carry into modern Anglo-American law: (i) the sovereign is bound by law; (ii) deprivations of person or property require lawful process; (iii) trial by peers precedes condemnation; (iv) justice is neither sold, delayed, nor denied.

Editorial note. Prohibitions del Roy (1607) and Case of Proclamations (1610) applied Magna Carta to constrain James I. Bonham's Case (1610) drew on it to assert judicial review of parliamentary acts contrary to fundamental law. Nineteenth-century American opinions treated the charter as the interpretive baseline for procedural due process.

Editorial note. Magna Carta functions in American constitutional adjudication as a historical touchstone rather than a rule of decision. Courts invoke it to identify the meaning of "due process," "law of the land," and "speedy justice" as those phrases stood at the framing.

Editorial note. See U.S. Const. amend. V (Due Process; Takings); U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1 (Due Process against the States); Petition of Right (1628); English Bill of Rights (1689).

Editorial note. Magna Carta supplies the historical justification for the requirement that every deprivation of life, liberty, or property proceed through recognized legal process before an impartial tribunal.