Saturday, March 16, 2013

Know Your Constitution with Douglas V. Gibbs - Article I, Section 10, Prohibitions to the States

A quick note before you watch the video.  In the class that this video was made of a person asked about written constitutions in history, and I said the first was a British Document. When another student offered the Magna Carta, I replied there was another even older. That older document I was thinking of, but could not remember the name of, was the Charter of Liberties in 1100, which came over a hundred years before the Magna Carta.

That said, there were also others in other parts of the world that also came before the Magna Carta.

Muhammad offered a written set of laws early on in history called the Charter of Medina, 622.

Japan's Seventeen-article constitution was written in 604.

The Romans first codified their constitution in 450 BC, calling them the Twelve Tables. Roman law was organized under a single code in 438 as Codex Theodosianus.

In 621 BC a scribe named Draco codified what is considered to be cruel oral laws of the city-state of Athens. The severity of those rules prescribed by Draco is the reason today we call severe rules "Draconian". In 594 BC the ruler of Athens, Solon, created the Solonian Constitution. Cleisthenes reformed the Athenian constitution and set it on a democratic footing in 508 BC.

Aristotle around 350 BC was one of the first in recorded history to make a formal distinction between ordinary law and constitutional law.

The Sumerian king Urukagina of Lagash (modern day Iraq) issued a code of justice around 2300 BC. The Code of Ur-Nammu of Ur dates back to around 2050 BC.

Other codes of laws also existed in many civilizations from Babylon to the Germanic tribes. Codifying laws has been a common practice in history, but none of them come close to the brilliance of the United States Constitution.



-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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