La Magna Carta e la legge di Lavoisier. Attualità e continuità nella common law.

This article argues the text of the Magna Carta, now 800 years old, reflects many of the values that are at the center of the modern constitutionalism. The starting point is the capacity of the document to survive in the centuries thanks to the ambiguity of its clauses which allowed to be reinterpreted on the basis of historical and social changes. The issue also analizes the different role that Magna Carta takes into British and American order. If in the British order, which continues to be based on unwritten constitution, two clauses survive until now, the idea – liberties can be exercised only when the power is limited – is the foundation of the modern relationship between Parliament and Government. In the American system, instead, some of the clauses of Magna Carta are incorporated in Federal Constitution and in some of States Constitutions. So that the document from 1215 are mentioned in several decisions of Supreme Court or to confirm the textual meaning of the Constitutional test or to support evolutive interpretation of it, showing the vivacity of Magna Carta nowadays. The Greater Charter demonstrates, for once, that – even for jurists – operates Lavoisier’s law: nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed and it can only serve the present and the future.