Winning Entry in Springfield Bar #MagnaCartaOnFleek & #RuleOfLawRocks Social Media Contest

By Joseph Essman (@fistfulofseals) 

Central High School, Springfield, Missouri

As the Magna Carta exhibition comes to a close, I feel like I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the Magna Carta, and to a greater extent the so-called “rights of man”(though I’d prefer to say “rights of humans”). I don’t have space in a tweet to really say all of this, so I’m typing it up on a document like this. I’ll try to keep it relatively brief, though. I know that you Springfield Bar people are busy.

The idea of a Magna-Carta style document is interesting, and almost contradictory in a way. It’s sort of a law-above-the-law; even a King, who once had absolute power, would have to follow these laws. These laws limit the government’s power, and the government in turn makes efforts to keep peace among the people. On paper, it sounds like such laws wouldn’t be very effective - the government still has authority over the people, and it could be argued that even if they broke them, the people wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. However, ever since the Magna Carta pioneered these laws eight hundred years ago, they’ve done their job.

That isn’t to say that all constitutions have been good - the British Constitution from the 1700s, for example, was unwritten. It’s much easier to bend the rules when you don’t have them written down in front of you. The flaws in the British Constitution were a part of the reason that the United States split from the British Empire - at first, the Revolutionary War had been fought simply in protest of Britain’s needless and unethical taxation. However, it became a war for independence when Thomas Paine’s Common Sense warned the American people that the British Constitution was inherently in conflict with American ideals of liberty.

However, despite the issues these laws could and still do have, the positives of them outweigh the negatives by an absurd margin. they’ve served, time and time again, as a standard of upholding basic human liberty. It could be argued that freedom of speech wouldn’t really exist without constitutions. The most beautiful ideas, of course, are those of equality. While equality for all has yet to truly arrive, the Magna Carta was a crucial first step. 800 years is a long time, but the progress we’ve made since the signing of the Magna Carta is astounding. Thanks to this simple document, people began to establish that there should be a universal law, that no person is above - not even a monarch.

People generally think of the Magna Carta as some old piece of parchment that helped some Barons get more freedom - and to an extent, that’s true. However, the enduring 800 year legacy of the Magna Carta is what makes it so important to the history of humanity. Thanks to it, we as a people have been moving more and more towards a society of equality, fairness, and free speech