As the Commons Blog's resident Brit, I feel it incumbent on me to say a little more about RFK Jr.'s strange view of Magna Carta. As the British Library translation makes clear, the references to fisheries have nothing whatsoever to do with "free access to fisheries in navigable waters." Fish-weirs were to be removed in order to make rivers navigable again, not to provide a fish for every pot.

The other section, "River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly," (Clause 47) prevented the executive power (to use modern terminology) from appropriating private property for its own use.

Thankfully, English fishermen, jealously preserving the "public right to fish" that grew out of this clause through jurisprudence, have used Common Law mechanisms to prevent a tragedy of the commons. The Pride of Derby fishing club, for instance, went to law to reduce pollution in their waters.

Magna Carta, by instituting the sanctity of due process in the legal system ("To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice," Claue 40), in fact laid the groundwork for such Common Law actions. The environmental protection system was therefore put in place in 1215.

This is a far cry from RFK Jr's strange insistence that federal environmental laws restore the free market. Instead, they are otiose. Magna Carta gave us a system that should work in every case. Ironically, it is the cases where the executive power has accrued to itself exactly the sort of appropriations that Magna Carta was designed to stop that has caused the real problems.