Eight Hundred Years of the Magna Carta

The Magna Carta was signed on June 15, 1215, eight hundred years next month.  We in Texas look from our Texas Revolution to the American Revolution for inspiration,  Our country's founding fathers looked to the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for inspiration.  We need to remember the  importance of the Magna Carta as we map the future for Texas and America:  the importance of a government constrained by laws for the protection of our liberties.

The Wall Street Journal had a wonderful article about the Magna Carta that you can read by googling "Magna Carta: Eight Centuries of Liberty by Daniel Hannan."

Here are a few quotes from the lengthy article to whet your appetite: 

The idea of the law coming up from the people, rather than down from the government, is a peculiar feature of the Anglosphere.

America’s Founders ... saw parliamentary government not as an expression of majority rule but as a guarantor of individual freedom. How different was the Continental tradition, born 13 years later with the French Revolution, which saw elected assemblies as the embodiment of what Rousseau called the “general will” of the people.

In that difference, we may perhaps discern explanation of why the Anglosphere resisted the chronic bouts of authoritarianism to which most other Western countries were prone.

The defense of liberty is your job and mine. It is up to us to keep intact the freedoms we inherited from our parents and to pass them on securely to our children.

And who is Daniel Hannan?  Mr. Hannan is a British member of the European Parliament for the Conservative Party, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the author of “Inventing Freedom: How the English-speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.”

A great Texas must be built upon the rule of law.  Texas needs great lawyers and statesmen.

Robert