Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
From English Declarations to American Freedoms: The Evolution of Rights
Dr. Beienberg explores how the English Bill of Rights shaped American rights philosophy more indirectly than commonly believed, revealing fundamentally different understandings between British and American views on rights protection.
• Americans and British took different lessons from the Glorious Revolution – British focused on parliamentary supremacy while Americans emphasized fundamental rights
• English Bill of Rights primarily restricted the monarch rather than all government institutions
• British view assumes Parliament will protect rights; American system is skeptical of all government power
• Similar language appears in both documents (cruel and unusual punishment, quartering soldiers, bearing arms)
• Key difference: English speech protections only applied within Parliament, while American version was universal
• American founders were uniquely concerned that even elected majorities could violate individual rights
• British system views elections themselves as the fundamental protection of liberty
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
talking again about the English Bill of Rights and how they helped shape the US Bill of Rights, and once again we have one of our favorites, dr Beienberg, here. To kind of help us understand, dr Beienberg, how did it shape the US Bill of Rights?
Speaker 2:So it shaped the Bill of Rights, I would actually say, more indirectly than many people think. So one of the themes that we've talked about in other parts of the podcast is that the Americans and the British took very, very different lessons from the English Bill or, excuse me, from the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and 1689. So two of the products of that are obviously John Locke's writings and the English Bill of Rights is another. And as we talk, just as a brief sort of kind of connection to that, remember, the Americans understand the Glorious Revolution to be fundamentally a guarantee of both substantive sets of rights as well as a sort of establishment of local government. And the British understand the legacy of the Glorious Revolution to be one about a strong parliament. And that really plays out as you look through the English Bill of Rights.
Speaker 2:Now, when we think of the US Bill of Rights today, it's very much a focus on the first eight and the idea of this as a set of individual rights. But in many ways the English Bill of Rights is actually closer to a separation of powers document and that's clear from the very beginning. If you look at the first sorts of protests that it makes, which then the English Bill of Rights is sort of redundant where it has a list of count one, count two, count three, count four things that James II has been doing and therefore, and then there's a list of sort of rights or guarantees that the new English monarchs, william and Mary, agree to, mary being again the daughter of the deposed British king and her husband, william, who is effectively he's got a strange title but it's effectively a sort of quasi-hereditary governor of the Netherlands. But they basically take over in England and as a condition of that they agree to this English Bill of Rights that has been given to them by Parliament. So some of the objections that are raised very early on is and this will play out not in the US Bill of Rights but in the US Constitution is a protest against the British King dispensing with law or failing to enforce law passed by Parliament. And so this is where you see in the US Constitution the guarantee that the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and you see the same language in the state constitutions with the governors right. So we think of this very much as a separation of powers claim. But the English and the Americans both understood that effectively, fair execution of the law is itself a kind of a civil liberty or a kind of a right. So that doesn't translate into the US Constitution. It does translate into lots ofS Constitution. It does translate into lots of the state declarations of rights, particularly the ones that are written at the time of the founding. They'll include this sort of a language. So that's one thing that I think is worth emphasizing.
Speaker 2:Relatedly, the English Bill of Rights is a guarantee, basically against the king and not against parliament, whereas today, right, it doesn't matter, the president can't violate the First Amendment, congress can't violate the First Amendment. Eventually, through the 14th Amendment, the states can't violate the First Amendment. But the English Bill of Rights is fundamentally a set of guarantees that are agreed to by the king and that parliament can modify. Right Again, remember, there is no formal English constitution in the same sense of, like you walk over there and you stare at the document with the glowing light, right, like there are, where everybody is sort of agreeing to be bound by it. In the same way, the English constitution, so to speak, is a set of super important agreement and parliamentary statutes, but they're not binding, they're not unchangeable in the same sense. So, just as a clear example of this.
Speaker 2:England obviously has very aggressive gun control laws. I'm not interested in discussing the merits of gun control laws one way or the other, but they would be probably pretty clearly in tension with the language of the English Bill of Rights if it also applied to Parliament. So Charles III can't go door to door and impose gun control regimes, but under the English understanding of the English Bill of Rights Parliament certainly can, and so this sort of foreshadows a little bit of the way that psychologically the Americans and the English understand this revolution differently. That, yes, the Americans aren't stupid. They understand that officially this is guarantees against parliament or, excuse me, against the king, but functionally they understand these as increasingly sort of substantive, fundamental, foundational rights that ought to be held and guaranteed regardless of the government institution that's imposing it. So again, we sort of lose that in the way that we think of the US Bill of Rights, as this is just a set of individual rights guarantees, because we have to basically decide and say these are actually individual rights. This isn't basically something we're just concerned about the king overreaching on. So some of the language in terms of what's guaranteed is pretty similar the language against cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment and in the state constitutions is more or less word for word from the English Declarations of Rights.
Speaker 2:There's a protest against quartering soldiers, which obviously becomes a big deal in the American Revolution, although, strikingly, the quartering soldiers language is not as explicit as the prohibition. In the same way, in the sort of, and therefore section of it, there is a protest against and again this goes back to separation of powers raising a standing army but importantly, without the consent of parliament, so parliament can do this, which then that actually translates to standing armies in the US Constitution with the two-year congressional appropriation, and one that I think is really striking. And then there's again some of the others. There's a restriction on the ability of the king to restrict. There's a restriction on the ability of the king to restrict arms, which is to say there's basically sort of restriction you know gun rights provisions of sorts. There's basically sort of restriction you know gun rights provisions of sorts, but they're restricted only to Protestants being applicable and they also have the caveat saying accept the such restrictions as allowed by law, basically, which again leaves a lot of leeway for parliaments to do it in a way that, you know, the Americans have Americans in their both their state and their federal constitution have held this to be a more individual right.
Speaker 2:But I think one thing that's really really striking and illustrates just this fundamental difference in some ways there is no sort of freestanding right of freedom of speech in the English Bill of Rights.
Speaker 2:There is a freedom of speech and sort of debate within parliament, so in some sense it's a protection of parliament basically talking and critiquing the king, and there is a protection of the rights to petition the king.
Speaker 2:So there's a protection of the right to basically protest hey king, fix this.
Speaker 2:Hey king, work on this, hey don't do this but strictly speaking, that doesn't have quite the same sort of and a protection of the right to speak in general, or even necessarily to speak against Parliament potentially, if you want to be really strict about it.
Speaker 2:So really, the English Bill of Rights sets up the strong prohibition against sort of an autocratic monarch and it creates the idea of a set of rights that are held to be really important, that they sort of assume Parliament will protect, but that the rights in the English Bill of Rights themselves don't actually apply against parliament, which again you can see how this, as we've seen it again and again, is part of why sort of the logic of the American Revolution very much is this are these sort of foundational rights that are sort of always applying and the main thing is that we want to protect sort of local and divided and decentralized government, or is this really basically specifically just against a monarch? And the English Bill of Rights very much tilts in the latter direction of being really skeptical of monarchical power, much more comfortable with parliamentary power, and that just fundamentally doesn't translate over to the American context, even as the list of rights that they think are important has a lot of continuity.
Speaker 1:So in the English Bill of Rights they're looking at protecting themselves from the king, whereas, like when you look at, you know the First Amendment, congress shall make no law, but it doesn't talk about the president. Does that matter? That it's not specifically naming a president no-transcript is going to be doing basically.
Speaker 2:I mean, we've again lost the sense of this in the days we're not nearly as strict about separation of powers as they were. But yeah, they're much more fundamentally concerned that the legislature can do wrong. They think that in fact and this is, you know, we're going to have a lot of sessions on Madison, right Madison is concerned that majorities of even elected people whether that's because of passions of the voters or temporary panic or sort of you know log rolling cabals of one group against another, or sort of log rolling cabals of one group against another. The American system is much more skeptical that the government itself, especially the federal government, but the state's governments as well, that the government itself, if elected, that the elected people will themselves make violations of civil liberties. The British understanding is a little bit more that as long as we have elections, that is the fundamental civil liberty, that if we elect the people Parliament will not break our civil liberties. The Americans are not quite so optimistic about that.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you. I think that that is a very concise answer to. I mean, there are definitely ways that the English Bill of Rights has influenced our Bill of Rights, but then there's also some really key differences, Dr Beinberg, as always, thank you so much. Yep, my pleasure.
