The Magna Carta often gets cited as an important "founding document" in a lot of secondary education history courses in the US, where its importance in the eye of the "Founding Fathers" is emphasized. However, the Magna Carta seems like it was more of a bunch of barons trying to limit the power of the King rather than trying to pave the way for full civil rights and liberties for Johnny Public. Additionally, Ralph Turner seems to be of the opinion that the Magna Carta as a statute didn't actually do very much after the 15th century and was not central to the structure and organization of the English system of government. Is this true? Or is the Magna Carta truly a landmark document?
It's important to keep in mind the time period we're talking about here. This was the first time in history that an English king was issued a document limiting his powers(who was supposedly ordained by God himself). Consider that at the time a King was infallible in his reign and could pretty much do anything to anyone he wanted. In fact, one of the core principles of the magna carta, the whole bit about a freeman being subject to the law of the land was massive; and to this day could be considered one of the founding principles of law in the western world. Hypothetically speaking, the king had rule over every subject in his lands, and could with the wave of a hand have you executed on a whim.
It is a landmark document in the sense that it set the foundation for law in England, and as a result eventually the United States. In your reference to "johnny public" that would have been anyone not considered a serf, and whilst the effects of the Magna Carta were not sweeping changes across the entirety of England, it still affected those who previously could only pledge loyalty to the crown.
Poly Sci/History Major here.
Because Civil Rights(not necessarily the racial but the Human in general) is a march not an explosion.
To compare it to human evolution, the Magna Carta is like Australopithecus a very important step in the path towards the constitution. It's not that the Magna Carta was some supremely egalitarian concept its that it was part of a chain of ideas that was instrumental in the construct of modern political theory.
Have you heard of the concept of knowledge is best described as man standing on the shoulders of other men? That is what the Magna Carta is. You can draw a very easy line between Magna Carta to David Hume and his theory of Identity, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract, and and finally to the federalist Papers. All of these Ideas built on each other sometimes in opposite ways but they all where part of the building blocks of American Political Theory.