Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights : From Magna Carta to Modernity

Leading scholars explore the significance of Magna Carta in the recognition of rights, both in England and other parts of the world. This collection will be of interest to legal historians, legal academics, lawyers and historians concerned with a thematic development of how, and why, law changes over time.

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.