Ask a lawyer where the rule of law comes from and, sooner or later, the answer is Magna Carta. The Great Charter, sealed by King John in a meadow at Runnymede in 1215, sits in the professional memory as the place it all began: due process, trial by one's peers, the idea that even a king answers to the law. Most of us carry that impression without having read a word of it.
Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, brokered the charter to wage peace between an unpopular king and a faction of rebel barons who had run out of patience with him. It promised the church its liberties, the barons protection from unlawful imprisonment, access to courts that would neither sell nor delay justice, and limits on what the crown could extract from its tenants, the whole arrangement policed by a council of 25 barons.
The Magna Carta failed. King John started maneuvering to void it almost immediately, and got his wish: Pope Innocent III annulled the charter by papal bull on August 24, roughly ten weeks after the wax was sealed. Neither side honored its commitments. England then collapsed into civil war. John died 16 months later, mid-war, of dysentery. As peace treaties go, it ranks below the ones that at least held through winter.
The text does not help the legend much either. Most of it is medieval housekeeping. One clause orders every fish weir ripped out of the Thames and the Medway. Another standardizes the measures of wine, ale, and corn across the kingdom. One protects widows from being forced to remarry. Even the way we cite it by clause number is a later invention: William Blackstone imposed the numbering in 1759, five and a half centuries after the fact.
That is because Runnymede was not a constitutional convention. It was a hostage negotiation. John was broke, freshly humiliated in France, and trusted by nobody who had ever lent him money or a castle. The barons had an army in London. The charter was the price of standing that army down, and John paid it the way a man pays a ransom, with every intention of getting it back.
And yet two of its provisions outlived all of that, and they still read like a charter of basic rights:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice.
Note the quiet work "free man" is doing. Most of England's population was unfree, and unfree peasants were not invited to the party. The barons were protecting barons. But they expressed it in lofty generalizations, and those never stay loyal to their drafters.
The elevation of the charter into its current idealization took centuries - and a lot of motivated lawyering. First it needed the force of law, and so it was proclaimed as law, again and again, over the years. Henry III's regents reissued the charter to shore up a child king's legitimacy, and the 1225 version became the durable one. Then Edward Coke picked it up in the 1620s and read it, with considerably more advocacy than history, as an ancient charter of English liberty that bound even Stuart kings. The American colonists, chafing under the English crown, took Coke at his word and wielded the charter as a basis for revolution.
Along the way, "the law of the land" became "due process of law." And due process evolved into the Fifth Amendment, and later the Fourteenth Amendment, to the US Constitution.
Magna Carta is the profession's founding argument, and lawyers won it the hard way. The charter bound no one in 1215 and was dead within weeks. It became law slowly, through generation after generation of counsel insisting in court and in Parliament that it already was law, until the insisting came true.
That is the ordinary work of the profession, carried on for eight centuries: holding power to rules it would rather ignore, and making them apply even to the defendant everyone hates, and even when the sovereign finds them inconvenient. Every lawyer who makes the state follow its own law is standing where Coke and the colonists once stood, quoting a failed peace treaty and daring anyone to say it does not count.
Not bad for a document aimed at getting the fish weirs out of the Thames.
