Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights
From Magna Carta to Modernity

A unique volume demonstrating how law changes by reason of challenges to authority which seek the recognition of rights.

Catharine MacMillan (Edited by), Charlotte Smith (Edited by)

9781108453363, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 January 2020

361 pages
15.3 x 23 x 1.8 cm, 0.6 kg

'… the book makes a number of insightful and novel contributions to scholarship both on Magna Carta itself and its legacy … of interest and relevance to contemporary lawyers both public and private. The book should also be additionally praised for not being jurisdictionally limited to England …' Robert Brett Taylor, Comparative Legal History

While challenges to authority are generally perceived as destructive to legal order, this original collection of essays, with Magna Carta at its heart, questions this assumption. In a series of chapters concerned with different forms of challenges to legal authority - over time, geographical place, and subject matters both public and private - this volume demonstrates that challenges to authority which seek the recognition of rights actually change the existing legal order rather than destroying it. The chapters further explore how the myth of Magna Carta emerged and its role in the pre-modern world; how challenges to authority formed the basis of the recognition of rights in particular areas within England; and how challenges to authority resulted in the recognition of particular rights in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany. This is a uniquely insightful thematic collection which proposes a new view into the processes of legal change.

Introduction Catharine MacMillan
Part I. Magna Carta, Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights in England: 1. Magna Carta: the emergence of the myth John Baker
2. Benefit of clergy and the authority of Magna Carta Margaret McGlynn
3. How to get rid of a king: lawyering the Revolution of 1399 David Seipp
4. Magna Carta and the fragmented authorities of the later Middle Ages Anthony Musson
5. Revolution principles and the revolution bench Mike Macnair
Part II. Broader Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights in England: 6. Magna Carta Clauses 4 and 5 and the problem of account Joshua Getzler
7. Some effects of war on the law in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England James Oldham
8. Tax, freedom and social expectations: fiscal impact on the built environment in nineteenth-century England Chantal Stebbings
Part III. Magna Carta, Challenges to Authority and the Recognition (and Rejection) of Rights beyond England: 9. The Magna Carta in the German discourse about English constitutional law between the eighteenth and the early twentieth century Andreas Thier
10. A Magna Carta for the world? The constitutional protection of foreign subjects in the age of revolution Daniel Hulsebosch
11. 'The state of slavery': the slave, grace, and the rise of pro-slavery constitutionalism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world Patricia Hagler Minter
12. The Royal Proclamation of 1763: an indigenous Magna Carta's rough ride in British Columbia Hamar Foster
13. 'Law: challenges to authority and the recognition of rights': examples from British India Raymond Cocks
14. 'Unfortunate necessities of warfare?': Australia's national security regulations and the right to free speech during World War I Diane Kirkby.

Subject Areas: Legal system: general [LNA], Legal history [LAZ]