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''It is now the settled doctrine of this Court that the Due Process Clause embodies a system of rights based on moral principles so deeply imbedded in the traditions and feelings of our people as to be deemed fundamental to a civilized society as conceived by our whole history. Due Process is that which comports with the deepest notions of what is fair and right and just.''1 The content of due process is ''a historical product''2 that traces all the way back to chapter 39 of Magna Carta, in which King John promised that ''[n]o free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.''3 The phrase ''due process of law'' first appeared in a statutory rendition of this chapter in 1354. ''No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law.''4 Though Magna Carta was in essence the result of a struggle over interest between the King and his barons,5 this particular clause over time transcended any such limitation of scope, and throughout the fourteenth century par liamentary interpretation expanded far beyond the intention of any of its drafters.6 The understanding which the founders of the American constitutional system, and those who wrote the due process clauses, brought to the subject they derived from Coke, who in his Second Institutes expounded the proposition that the term ''by law of the land'' was equivalent to ''due process of law,'' which he in turn defined as ''by due process of the common law,'' that is, ''by the indictment or presentment of good and lawful men.. . Or by writ original of the Common Law.''7 The significance of both terms was procedural, but there was in Coke's writings on chapter 29 a rudimentary concept of substantive restrictions, which did not develop in England because of parliamentary supremacy, but which was to flower in the United St
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