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Making the Charter Great: Claiming Rights in Law’s Visual and Emotional Vernacular


Magna Carta is great not because of its words; it is great because it long ago became an icon through which we envision an expanding array of rights. Lawyers ca.1600 began its transformation from text to icon. Non-lawyers took up this process, invoking the Charter-as-icon to make new demands of what law must be. Eighteenth-century caricaturists made the Charter a literal icon, by which rights of all kinds might be asserted and defended. The visual language of satire provoked emotional engagement with the Charter as the chief means for rights claiming. The Charter, its text long obscured, continues to work at a visceral level, making it the means by which people around the world claim rights as citizens of individual states and as humans under international law. In this way, a peculiarly English constitutional patriotism has produced a global idiom for asserting rights.