As I am an amateur essayist and not a professional legal person, you would think that that would make me unqualified to write about questions of law. The truth is that anyone with half a brain, half an hour, half a cup of coffee, and a lot of patience, can actually write quite a lot about the law. All it requires is for you to read the law with some amount of understanding and then a degree of sense to see how it fits in with other law.
The idea that you need a law degree in order to practice law, exists because barristers and solicitors found it convenient and more profitable to close the shop. They can also practice discrimination about who is allowed to practice law on the sly.
In fact, the first Justice to be appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United state who even attended an actual law school was Levi Woodbury, appointed to the Court in 1846. This soon became the norm and James F. Byrnes and Stanley Forman Reed, were the last two Justices not to have gone to law school with their tenure ending in 1942 and 1957 respectively.
One used to "read the law" and if anything, I have been taught under the tutelage of the courts themselves because I am not completely naive when it comes to the law. I have been in and around various courts and tribunals for the better part of two decades, in various capacities as either a court recorder, or legal gopher for a member of a tribunal and so I have seen a lot. One of the jobs that you get to do as a court recorder, subject to what can at times feel like peonage and umbrage, is to sit in the District Court of New South Wales, listening to various callovers and petty matters before the court.
I have listened to lots of cases where loons have decided to represent themselves in court and challenge a full house of charges including assault occasioning bodily harm, assault of police officers, illicit drug use, but mostly break, enter and steal.
I reckon that I must have first heard someone try to use the astoundingly buckwild appeal to Magna Carta that someone was claiming to be unlawfully arrested under the common law, around about 2001. The current "sovereign citizen" movement is a new phase of buckwild shenaniganry which is just the latest round of repackaging on ancient lunacy.
There have probably been appeals made in courts to Magna Carta ever since the barons decided to acost King John in the field at Runnymede, down the road from Windsor, on that summer's day in the Ides of June 1215. The great myth that Magna Carta must be some holy document instead of a list of demands by self-interested thugs to another self-interested thug, took off during the period of the puritans, through the Commonwealth and the period of the republic and through the Glorious Revolution; each time people reimagined it to be something magical and wonderful, instead of a thing which took 82 years to enact; in the reign of Edward I.
Jump forward another 807 years and very little remains operative. Although Magna Carta formed part of the corpus juris adopted in Australian Law under various reception statutes, very little of it is even relevant. My general working theory is that most people who want to invoke Magna Carta as part of some wingnut claim as to why the laws of the land don't apply to them, have never read the document, don't understand what any of it means, and have no idea of what is still on the books and whether or not those sections are relevant.
For the record, there are only 4/5 clauses which are still operative and they are listed below:
https://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/magna_carta_1215
Clause 1:
We have first of all granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed, for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church is to be free, and to have its full rights and its liberties intact, and we wish this to be observed accordingly, as may appear from our having of our true and unconstrained volition, before discord arose between us and our barons, granted, and by our charter confirmed, the freedom of elections which is deemed to be the English Church’s very greatest want, and obtained its confirmation by the lord pope Innocent III; which we will ourselves observe and wish to be observed by our heirs in good faith in perpetuity. And we have also granted to all the free men of our kingdom, for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity, all the following liberties, for them and their heirs to have and to hold of us and our heirs.
Clause 1 almost seems to suggest that the barons have some say in the election of various ecclesiastical posts within the church as it is landed in England. The weird thing is that the Church of England as a separate and distinct entity away from the Catholic Church didn't happen until Henry VIII made that formal separation in 1534.
I do not know what kind of liberties of the English Church that the chartists were claiming but I do know that the relevance for the modern claimants of the Sovereign Citizen movement here, is exactly nil.
Clause 13:
And the city of London is to have all its ancient liberties and free customs, both on land and water. Moreover we wish and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns and ports are to have all their liberties and free customs.
By way of background, Henry I granted the people of London a Sheriff along with control of the county of Middlesex. This placed Middlesex under the control of the 'commune' of London. This is not quite a charter but it is close. By 1141, both Middlesex and London were considered to constitute a single community and this included the whole body of male citizens over the age of 30 who were landholders or who were free citizens of the City. This at some point between 1141 and 1189 the city was given a charter and the City of London Corporation, gained the right to appoint a Mayor. The right to directly elect the Mayor came in 1215; after Magna Carta.
The ancient liberties and free customs include items such as the aforementioned right to elect the Mayor but also that the City barred the Monarch from entering the city without permission. Evidently the chartists thought that worthy enough to remind the King that this was not to be messed with.
Again, I do not know what relevance that the great wen upon the Thames has to do with someone standing in a court in Australia. Maybe as long as they gaze on Waterloo sunsets, they are in paradise?
Clause 33:
All fish-weirs are in future to be entirely removed from the Thames and the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea-coast.
I have no idea what kind of relevance someone in Australia thinks that this has in this country. I fail to see what the existence of fish weirs in a river, which from about 1550 until 1985 had no fish at all in it because it was so heavily polluted, has to do with a country which is more than 10,000 miles away.
"What's that got to do with the price of fish?" Quite a lot if you're trying to evade the law by claiming the law doesn't apply to you but a piece of 807 year old legislation does.
Clause 39:
No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.
Clause 40:
To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.
Clause 39 is curious. A "free man" is generally a landowner, who had various rights of passage throughout the kingdom and the right to hold, sell, and buy land.
Clause 40 is a promise by the chartists, to abandon the practice of selling justice; which is related to the concept of scutage which is found in Clause 12 (repealed). Apparently in addition in scutage which allowed knights to pay their way out of having to do military service, they were also being charged if they wanted justice to fall in their direction. Clause 40 is basically the chartists promising to abandon institutional bribery.
Someone who is brought before a court in Australia is already being proceeded against, through the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land. That would in fact be why they are there in the first place. Also, someone who is being asked to pay a fine is not being sold justice. A fine is money to be paid as punishment for an offence and not the court's charge for the privilege of having justice metered to them.
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Basically, 807 years later, while parts of Magna Carta might technically be on the books, it is not much more than a shiny historical bauble. Since it was sealed, it has been nullified, revised, forgotten, remembered, repealed and now venerated. It certainly should not be relied on in practice by people who have decided to break the law.
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