Two Magna Cartas in D.C.
Last edited Mon Dec 29, 2014, 10:19 AM - Edit history (4)
We had nice weather the day after the election in D.C., so I walked over to the National Archives during lunch. David Rubenstein's Magna Carta has been moved to its own exhibit room. I thought that's what this was all about, but it turns out that the Library of Congress has a copy on exhibit now too.
When I got to the National Archives, I found myself the only person in line for the "empty your pockets of all metal and electronic items" search. There were maybe a dozen people in the Rotunda, the room with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
It's not crowded now, the way it is during the spring and summer. Go on down. Take all the time you want.
Two Magna Cartas in D.C.
By Geoff Edgers October 31
It may look like any other crinkly piece of paper under glass, but Magna Carta is to constitutional law what Louis Armstrong was to the trumpet. More than 570 years before the U.S. Constitution rolled off the presses, the Original MC put the king on notice and established the right of due process. ... Magna Carta — and never put “the” before it — also had some wacky references to two of England’s less-favored groups, Jews and women. We’ll get to that later.
When we heard that the Library of Congress would be displaying one of only four remaining original copies of the 1215 edition of the famed document, we had two thoughts: Cool, but doesn’t the National Archives already have Magna Carta? ... Yes and no. The Archives does have a copy, but it dates to 1297.
That, says Library of Congress public relations specialist Donna Urschel, is no small detail. “It’s like saying do you want to see the original Declaration of Independence or one that somebody wrote 80 years later?” she says.
Fair enough, though Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein did pay $21.3 million for the version now on display at the National Archives.
David M. Rubenstein, right, hands over a very expensive piece of vellum for nothing. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Actually, it's on loan. It still belongs to David Rubenstein.
Library of Congress shows how Magna Carta became a touchstone of constitutional law
Express
By Sadie Dingfelder November 6
@SadieDing
sadie.dingfelder@wpost.com
....
Magna Carta wasn’t signed into law until 1297, and its best-known provision, that “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions … except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land,” was buried among laws like one banning fish traps on the Thames.
Over the next 400 years, the document’s importance waxed and waned. It wasn’t until the early 1600s that Magna Carta assumed its current stature.
During that time, legal scholar Edward Coke was looking for an ancient basis for limiting the power of the king, and he found it in Magna Carta, which he interpreted clause by clause in “The Second Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England.”
That pageturner became required reading for lawyers and impressed American revolutionaries; Thomas Jefferson’s copy is part of the exhibit.
(Lincoln Cathedral)
See a Magna Carta from 1215, top, and Thomas Jefferson’s copy of legal scholar Edward Coke’s book, above, at the Library of Congress. (Library of Congress)
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