William Sharp McKechnie

William Sharp McKechnie (1863–1930) was a Scottish jurist and constitutional historian. Educated at Glasgow University, where he later held the chair of conveyancing, he practiced as a solicitor and lectured on constitutional law and history. His Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John (1905, revised 1914) replaced the antiquarian commentaries of earlier centuries with a modern clause-by-clause analysis that read the Charter as a feudal document of its own time rather than a charter of modern liberties, and it remained the standard work for most of the twentieth century.