800th anniversary should remind us to keep check on authority of the state
The celebration of the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, due to be celebrated by a Global Law Summit in 2015, is a powerful reminder of the need to check the authority of the state. Writing in NLJ this week, former head of civil rights group Justice Roger Smith comments drily on Chris Grayling’s promotion of the summit: “The Lord Chancellor duly went through the motions, clearly aware that the great charter of English liberty represented a bit of a trap for a minister currently in the process of trying to slash legal aid and cut back judicial review.”
