Covid, the courts and the Magna Carta

A few weeks ago, a group of 25 church leaders, supported by the Christian Legal Centre, filed a legal action challenging the government’s lockdown of churches as an unconstitutional invasion of church liberties.

In their pre-action letter, lawyers acting on behalf of the group cited Clause 1 of the Magna Carta as an unrevoked guarantee of religious freedom for the church: ‘that the Church of England shall be free and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable.’

However, University of Chicago Law School’s Professor Richard H. Helmholz has explained that, while Clause 1 was historically ‘designed immediately to secure the English church’s freedom in the choice of its own bishops and abbots’, it also ‘suffered from the ‘deplorably vague’ character of its words’.