January 15th, 2012 
admin Most scholars consider the Magna Charta (Latin for “Great Charter”), signed in England in 1215, to be the forerunner of the legal guarantees which exist today. King John of England, under heavy pressure from rebellious nobles, granted all English freemen certain rights “to be had and holden by them and their heirs…for ever.” At that time in history very few people in England were actually regarded as freemen, but it was a step in the right direction. Before the Magna Charta, any provisions for human rights were at the behest of the occasional benign ruler of the land.
More often than not rulers were prone to oppress their peoples using arbitrary authority that was only challenged when others wanted to seize the same powers for themselves. Efforts by peasants to win more economic freedom were ruthlessly suppressed. To this day in many lands, persons openly critical of government policy find themselves jailed or executed.
When American colonists began their struggle for freedom, they really just wanted the same basic rights as Englishmen that they thought they had been guaranteed since 1689. Only after repeated attempts to assert themselves had been rebuked did they proclaim independence, maintaining in the process that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The purpose of government is “to secure these rights.” wrote Thomas Jefferson. Contained in his description of basic rights and their higher source was a concept that had been around since the days of ancient Greece and Rome – that of natural law higher than any law conceived by humanity. A country founded on those basic principles could be expected to write them into its basic laws and so it did. From the start of its history as a nation, the supreme law of the United States has been its Constitution, not the authority of any person.