Habeas Corpus / GWOT

The civil rights entailed by habeas corpus -- a Latin phrase meaning something like "let you have the body" -- ultimately find their origin in the Magna Carta, a document which was signed (somewhat reluctantly) by King John of England nearly eight hundred years ago, in 1215, and which placed basic limitations on the absolute rule of the monarch or sovereign over the representative government of Parliament. Parliament would gradually expand its own rights by legislation, and so the more direct origin of habeas corpus is the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, whose formal title was "an Act for the better securing the liberty of the subject" (Chomsky 2012). The basic provision of the act was to allow remedy for those wrongfully or illegally imprisoned. Although the United States (unlike Great Britain) has a formal written Constitution containing enumerated rights, habeas corpus occupies a slightly odd position...
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