mweaver

Hi All! This post marks both the end of the Spring 2020 semester and the end of my internship duties. Despite the difficulties of this semester, I can truly say that I was able to finish my internship strong and that I produced an educational resource that will be used by the Center for Teaching the Rule of Law to teach about (you guessed it!) the rule of law. I have learned a lot during this semester especially about Magna Carta and the rule of law, but also about communication and carrying out research. My final project turned out to be a massive PowerPoint detailing the importance of Magna Carta in relation to the British Government, the United States Government, and the rule of law. This PowerPoint will be posted on the Center for Teaching the Rule of Law’s website and it will be used by both the Center and other educators as an educational resource to teach college-age and above students.

Similar to how Magna Carta states that the king is not above the law, the rule of law implies that everyone is bound by the law.​ The rule of law continues to teach this principle that everyone must be held accountable for their actions that was originally set forth in Magna Carta. Magna Carta was important because it was the first legal document to establish that everyone, including the king, must obey the law. Today this idea is carried out by teaching and upholding the rule of law. It is essential that everyone respect and obey the law and by teaching this concept to students it helps ensure that they will hold governmental figures accountable. Magna Carta and the rule of law both imply that everyone is bound by the law and by teaching these two principles together the importance of them is doubly enforced. 

 

 

Hi all! This week I have been researching Magna Carta’s influence on the American government. It has been argued that Magna Carta had an even more monumental influence on the United States’ founding documents than it has had on the British government. Most of Magna Carta’s importance to the U.S is its assertion that individual citizens have fundamental rights that cannot be infringed upon by the government. The U.S. Bill of Rights asserts this importance as do many of the U.S. state constitutions which incorporate declarations of citizen’s fundamental rights. Some of the guarantees in these documents that descended from Magna Carta include a citizen’s right to a jury trial and freedom from unlawful searches.

This past couple of weeks I have started finishing up this project. I have been condensing my research and adding it together and have started putting it into a PowerPoint. I am planning on making a short informational video with a condensed version of my research as well as a more thorough and complete PowerPoint. These will give a brief overview of the history of Magna Carta, the importance of Magna Carta to the British government, the importance of Magna Carta to the U.S. government, as well as a section detailing how the rule of law connects to Magna Carta. Both of these will be used as educational resources by the Center for Teaching the Rule of Law.

Hi all! Today I am posting from my makeshift desk in my truck, as you can see from the above picture! With Roanoke College’s move to online classes in response to the COVID19 pandemic, I have had to improvise and adapt my internship as well. I live in the middle of nowhere and WIFI at my home is not very reliable, so right now I am sitting in the parking lot of a closed coffee shop connecting to their internet. With everywhere closing and everyone practicing social distancing everyone has to make changes for the safety of all, that being said this is not how I was planning on finishing my Senior year, but we must persist!

This change has been somewhat difficult for my internship, but I am hoping to still be able to finish my Magna Carta project adequately. While the past couple of weeks have been challenging I have tried to continue my research without interruption as much as possible. In my last post, I discussed how I was researching how Magna Carta influenced the British government. I have continued that research and also started researching how Magna Carta has influenced the United States Government. I hope to wrap up my project within the next few weeks and create a finished product that I am proud of!

Since my last blog post, I have been doing a lot of research on Magna Carta. Magna Carta is a charter that was drafted in 1215 by Britain’s King John in response to a group of barons asking for their rights to be documented in a legal form. Since then Magna Carta has influenced many governmental systems and documents around the world, including the United States Bill of Rights. The charter was not incredibly influential when it was first written, but since then it has become the basis for many important documents. 

 This week I have mainly been reading a lot of books and articles on the history of Magna Carta, but I have also started researching how Magna Carta has influenced the British government. Magna Carta’s influence on the British government was not as monumental as its influence on the founding of the United States government. This idea is going to form the base of my PowerPoint in which I plan to compare and contrast how and why these two differ. I have also been considering, and speaking with the director of the Center, about looking into how Magna Carta influenced other governments that had once been under English control; I think it will be interesting to see how Magna Carta influenced other English colonized countries.  

This is the first of many posts I will make regarding my current internship and as such, it may be just a little bit lengthy. I am interning at the Center for Teaching the Rule of Law which is an on-campus group that, as you can gather from the title, teaches the rule of law and provides resources to teachers on the subject. While interning here I am going to be working on compiling and creating just such a resource. My primary task at the Center is to create a PowerPoint presentation detailing how Magna Carta influenced the United States constitution. I am also going to explore why/how Magna Carta has influenced the American government more so than the British Government and also how it has influenced the constitutions of other countries governing documents.

For the past week, my internship duties have been mainly researching and becoming familiar with the rule of law and Magna Carta. The director of the center has given me plenty of reading to do and it has occupied most of my time. I have mainly been reading research papers on the rule of law by Brian Tamanaha, as well as The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham (who are both experts on the topic). I have also done quite a bit of research on Magna Carta. One thing I found very interesting and helpful was a lecture by A.E. Howard about Magna Carta on the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s website; I am also reading a book by Howard about Magna Carta that I think will be very useful in relating Magna Carta to the individual governmental documents. For my PowerPoint, I think I would mainly like to focus on how Magna Carta influenced the U.S. constitution and why/how Magna Carta has influenced the American government more so than the British Government. I think the best way to organize the PowerPoint would be to have several sections addressing the different topics. So as a tentative starting point it could look something like 1. What is Magna Carta/history of Magna Carta, 2. How Magna Carta influenced the American government (this would probably be the biggest section and would need its own subsections), 3. Influence, or lack of, Magna Carta on English government and why this differs from America, 4. Why this is important/conclusion. As I get further into the research I will probably add a few more sections to this.