Uncertain Foundations: Magna Carta and the Evolution of Law

Que sais-je? What do I know? I know that Magna Carta—that revered document of 1215—has the peculiar distinction of being universally venerated yet universally misunderstood. Ask what it means and you receive different answers from each century: thirteenth-century barons claimed it protected noble rights, seventeenth-century parliamentarians insisted it mandated parliamentary supremacy, eighteenth-century reformers declared it established individual liberty. During the English Civil War, both Royalists and Parliamentarians invoked it as their authority! Is this confusion a flaw? Or is this productive ambiguity the very source of its greatness?

On the Wisdom of Not Knowing Where We Begin

I notice something curious when I consider how neural networks learn. A network’s success depends dramatically on where it begins—the random initialization of its parameters. One starting configuration allows gradient descent to find excellent solutions; another places decision boundaries in regions where gradients vanish, leaving the network helplessly stuck despite possessing architectural capacity for better answers. Small differences in initialization produce wildly different endpoints, much as small variations in 1215 might have yielded entirely different legal traditions.

This initialization sensitivity reminds me of constitutional development. Parliamentary evolution proceeded through no grand design, no founding moment of perfect clarity. Instead, recurring crises between monarchs and nobles demanded documented compromises—Magna Carta, its repeated confirmations, eventually the Glorious Revolution—each adding precedent to an accumulating framework. Like a neural network wandering through a loss landscape via local search, English law groped toward adequacy without guarantee of finding any global optimum.

On Accepting Imperfection as Strategy

What strikes me is how both systems embrace uncertainty rather than fleeing from it. Regularization techniques in machine learning—data augmentation, dropout, weight decay—essentially teach models intellectual humility. Don’t be too certain. Don’t memorize spurious patterns. Accept smoother, less confident solutions over chaotic ones that claim perfect fit. Is this not Pyrrhonian skepticism encoded in mathematics?

Magna Carta’s genius lay precisely in its ambiguity. Had it specified every particular with legal precision, it would have frozen in 1215, irrelevant within generations. Instead its productive vagueness allowed each age to reinterpret it according to contemporary needs. The document evolved through misreading, not strict construction. Like my essays, which I write, reread, and revise without ever reaching final truth, constitutional meaning emerged from iterative revision rather than original intention.

The Virtue of Wandering

Both legal evolution and neural optimization reveal something about how complex systems discover workable solutions: not through comprehensive planning or certainty about destinations, but through incremental adaptation guided by local feedback. Evolutionary local search mutates parameters, tests fitness, selects improvements—vulnerable to local minima, yes, but flexible and requiring no predetermined path.

English law accumulated similarly: crisis, documented compromise, precedent. No one in 1215 intended to create parliamentary democracy; that emerged centuries later through institutional wandering. The Common Law accreted through contradiction and revision, much as my thoughts accrete through essaying—trial, testing, drawing forth.

Perhaps productive systems must embrace uncertainty at their foundations. Certainty would paralyze them; ambiguity allows adaptation. We seek not truth but adequacy, not perfection but improvement. Que sais-je? I know that I know little—and perhaps that is the most useful knowledge of all.