Challenges to authority and the recognition of rights : from Magna Carta to modernity / edited by Catharine MacMillan and Charlotte Smith.

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

1st edition

89186

Magna Carta -- Congresses.

Rule of law -- England -- History.

Constitutional history -- England -- Sources.

Part I. Magna Carta, challenges to authority and the recognition of rights in England:

1. Magna Carta: the emergence of the myth

2. From Magna Carta to the abridgements: the naturalization of benefit of clergy

3. How to get rid of a king: lawyering the revolution of 1399

4. Illuminating Magna Carta: images of law and authority in Medieval statute books

5. Revolution principles and the revolution bench

Part II. Broader challenges to authority and the recognition of rights in England:

6. Magna Carta chapters 4 and 5 and origins of accountability

7. Some effects of war on the law in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England

8. The impact of tax on the landscape: social expectations and the built environment in nineteenth-century England

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

10. A Magna Carta for the world? The constitutional protection of foreign merchants in the age of revolution

11. The protection of our laws: the slave, grace, and the rise of proslavery constitutionalism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

12. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 in British Columbia: an indigenous Magna Carta's chequered Canadian career

13. Rights and power in nineteenth-century India: exploring an unstable relationship

14. When Magna Carta was suspended: national security and the challenge to freedom of speech in Australia, 1414-1919.

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 - Publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781108429238

ix, 351 p. ; 24 cm