Due Process Then and Now

What is due process, and what happens to it when the machinery of the state slips free of the law built to bind it? This contemporary-application episode takes the single medieval sentence at the heart of Saturday’s episode — clause 39 of Magna Carta, the principle that the state may not seize, imprison, destroy, or otherwise deprive a person except by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land — and holds it against modern deprivation at every level. Braiding three medieval inheritances (clause 39 as a control mechanism, Bracton’s “the law makes the king,” and Aquinas’s “an unjust law is no true law”), the episode moves from China’s emotion-recognition systems to the United Kingdom’s unlegislated facial-recognition dragnet to an American gradient that climbs from watching to killing — Flock Safety, Palantir, and finally the Caribbean and Pacific boat strikes, in which the executive has taken more than two hundred lives without charge or trial. At its center, the host draws on decades inside the video-surveillance industry to locate the real line: not surveillance versus none, but private and bounded versus public and unbounded — due process versus its absence, whether the thing at stake is privacy, property, liberty, or life. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com