Assignment Task: What led to the Magna Carta and what is its significance to democracy? Select the best answer.
Group of answer choices
About 800 years ago, King John of England acted as an authoritarian bully and a petulant child. He loved money and used political power to try to get more. He made up fake news (even 8 centuries ago). He lashed out wildly at people who he felt mocked him. He surrounded himself with sycophants. He punished those who spoke out against him. Do you recognize 21st century American figures who fit this description?
Needless to say, he was an extremely unpopular king. A group of rebel barons forced King John into agreeing to a royal charter of rights (The Magna Carta) that eventually became part of England's statute law -- renewed by each monarch in turn. It is a symbol of liberty -- the foundation of freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of a despot.
About 300 years ago The meeting of the English Barons and King John occurred at Runnymede. King John was forced to sign the document. The document required trial by a jury of one's peers. The document assured all English citizens freedom of speech. However it also increased the power of the monarchy.
The Magna Carta originated in the times of the ancient Greeks. It is a document that spelled out the rights of citizens. It included some of our most treasured rights including the right to liberty, happiness, freedom of speech and also the the right to bear arms (which did not include guns, obviously, at the time).
The Magna Carta originated in Roman Times. Jurists (iurisprudentes), legal experts who subjected written laws, rules and institutions to intellectual scrutiny and discussion in order to extract from them the fundamental legal principles they contained and then applied and tested those principles on hypothetical specific cases in order to then apply them to new legislation. The jurists were an elite body as there were probably fewer than 20 at any one time and their qualification for the role was their extensive knowledge of the law and its history. In imperial times they were incorporated within the general bureaucracy which served the emperor. Jurists also had something of a monopoly on legal knowledge as the opportunity to study law as part of the usual educational curriculum was not possible before the mid-2nd century CE. Jurists also wrote legal treatises, one of the most influential was On the Civil Law (De Iure Civili) by Q. Mucius Scaevola in the 1st century BCE.