Magna Carta

Translated from the Latin, “Magna Carta” means “Great Charter,” and great it is as the forerunner of constitutional law and a statement for the rights and freedoms of all people in a free society. In original form, Magna Carta was drafted by self-interested barons who had in desperate mind their own protection from King John. King John was characterized by a statesman leader but also chronicler of a later time, Winston Churchill, as ruthless and cruel, “with a cold, inhuman intelligence.” The barons were only trying to protect their own rights, not then the rights of all, but they planted the seed anyway for what has become our own Constitution and that of our individual states. Churchill spoke to the turmoil of the time, 1215 AD, in “A History of the English-speaking Peoples: The Birth…