‘To the Merchants of England’, Political Register (29 April 1815), pp. 518–19
1810s
“The Commons of England for Hereditary Fundamental Liberties and Propertiesy are blest above and beyond the Subjects of any Monarch or State in the World.
First, No Freeman of England ought to be imprisoned, or otherwise restrains, without Cause shewn, for which by Law, he ought to be so imprisoned.”
Source: Angliæ Notitia, 1676, 1704, p. 302: Cited in: Gerald Stourzh. "Liberal Democracy as a Culture of Rights: England, the United States, and Continental Europe." Bridging the Atlantic. (2002) p. 11
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Edward Chamberlayne 4
English writer 1616–1703Related quotes
Speech to the annual meeting of the British School at Athens in London (2 November 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 205.
1926
Context: September of the year 490 B. C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilization... was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis... had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalized and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilization as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses... England is the natural home of liberty and free institutions, and in her endeavour to secure these blessings for the world no country ought to be quicker than she in acknowledging her debt to Hellas.
“The law of England is a law of liberty”
R. v. Cobbett (1804), 29 How. St. Tr. 49.
Context: The law of England is a law of liberty, and, consistently with this liberty, we have not what is called an imprimatur (let it be printed); there is no such preliminary licence necessary. But if a man publish a paper, he is exposed to the penal consequences, as he is in every other act, if it be illegal.
Source: The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), p. 224
4 Burr. Part IV., 2377.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)
In his influential commentary on the provision many years later, Sir Edward Coke interpreted the words 'by the law of the land' to mean the same thing as 'by due proces of the common law'.
Obergefell v. Hodges http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf (26 June 2015).
2010s
“An enactment for the favour and liberty of the subject ought to have a liberal construction.”
Johnson v. Harris (1854), 3 W.R. 104.