“Magna Carta and the Roots of Ango-American Constitutional Thought”

John P. Davis, PhD Associate Professor of History Chair, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Division Hopkinsville Community College September 17, 2025 Historians have traditionally identified the Magna Carta (signed in 1215) as a break with the past, a milepost for ideas of liberty and the rights of man. John Davis, Associate Professor of History at Hopkinsville Community College, will survey the events, issues, and ideas that predated the signing of this “Great Charter,” and King John’s initial acknowledgment, signing, and recension of the document. This presentation concentrates on the primacy of “property” in English jurisprudence. The origins of thought that preceded the signing of the Magna Carta had developed gradually and unevenly over a long history but set the stage for the landed nobility to confront the King in 1215. Rather than merely a break with the past, the Magna Carta signified of an achievement or milestone in English and Western legal thought. The event drew on ideas that had been constructed gradually from multiple sources over centuries.

There will also be food at this event while supplies last in the Anderson Room of the Emerging Technologies Building