Journal of Supreme Court History

M a g n a C a rta : O u r S h a re d H e rita g e SRQPONMLKJ BRENDA HALESRQPONMLK Editor’s Note: Baroness Hale deliveredsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDC this speech as the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Annual Lecture in June 2015. Bo th Su p re m e Co u rts [o f the United States and the United Kingdom] are sur­ rounded by reminders of Magna Carta. The great doors into this building are adorned with a bronze relief of King John granting the Charter in 1215 and an original of the 1297 Charter is the first document the visitor to your National Archives sees before going upstairs to view the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Above the doors leading into the building which now houses the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is a stone relief of King John granting the Charter; and engraved on the glass doors leading from the entrance hall into our library is a facsimile of the 1225 Charter, with its most famous guarantee highlighted: “to no-one will we sell, to no-one will we deny or delay right or justice.” Those words, from chapter forty of the original Charter, together with the original chapter thirty-nine: “No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or out­ lawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”—still “have the power to make the blood race” (in the words of Lord Bingham of Comhill, the greatest British judge of this century)1—are the embodiment of the rights to life, liberty and property, not to be infringed without due process of law, still to be found on the statute book of the United Kingdom and in the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. My own blood raced too a few weeks ago—just after the last Parliament had been dissolved—when I received my own writ of summons, sealed with the privy seal, giving me exactly forty days’ notice of “a certain Parliament to be holden at Our City of Westminster”—harking back, I felt sure, to chapter fourteen of the original Magna Carta: And to obtain the common counsel of the kingdom about the assessing of an aid ... or of a scutage, we will cause to be summoned the arch­ bishops, bishops, abbots, earls and greater barons, individually by our letters—and, in addition, we will 136QPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA J O U R N A L O F S U P R E M E C O U R T H IS T O R Y srqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSR cau s e to be s u m m o ne d ge ne rally thro u gho u rs he riffsand bailiffs all tho s e ho lding o fu s in chie f-fo ra fixe d date , nam e ly , afte r the e xp iry o fat le as tfo rtyday s ,and to a fixe d p lace . . . That is the fo u ndatio no f a s e co nd p rincip lewhich we can trace at le as tas far back as Magna Carta—that the people from whom the taxes are levied should have a voice in deciding what they should be—which is now usually embodied in the slogan “no taxation without representation.” As I under­ stand it, it was disregarding that principle that lost us the American colonies getting on for six centuries later. I ought, therefore, to protest, because as a member of the House of Lords I do not have a vote in the election ofmembers ofthe House of Commons—I was summoned to the next Parliament weeks before the General Election, which told us who those members were going to be. But since the Law Lords left the House of Lords to become the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in 2009, neither do I have the right to sit or vote on any Parliamentary business in the House of Lords.2 So I am...