The Bill of Rights

11 Key excerpts on "The Bill of Rights"

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  The United States Constitution

  Questions and Answers

  • John R. Vile(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 The Adoption of The Bill of Rights and the Meaning of the First Amendment The Bill of Rights: BACKGROUND What is the name of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution? Today, scholars designated them collectively as The Bill of Rights; how- ever, the amendments are not phrased so much as rights as they are as prohibitions on governmental control. When did Congress first propose these amendments? The first Congress proposed them in September of 1789. How many signatures are on the congressional copy of this document? There are two. They were those of Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, the speaker of the House, and John Adams, the vice president. How did Congress identify these amendments? It referred to them as “Articles in addition to, and amendments of, the Constitution of the United States of America proposed by Congress and ratified by the Legislatures of the several states, pursuant to the Fifth Article of the original Constitution.” It did not specifically mention a bill of rights. When did the states ratify The Bill of Rights? They ratified them on December 15, 1791, when Virginia became the 11th of 14 states to approve. In a symbolic gesture, Connecticut and Georgia added their ratifications on the sesquicentennial celebration of the adoption of The Bill of Rights in 1939. 132 The United States Constitution Who was president when The Bill of Rights was ratified? George Washington was president; he had indicated his support for such a bill in his first inaugural address. What was the origin of the term “bill of rights”? Most American states already had such a “bill” or “declaration” of rights prior to the addition of such a bill of rights to the national Constitution. In 1689, the English Parliament had adopted a declaration of rights of British subjects based on “A Declaration of Rights” that William of Orange had made the previous year upon his acceptance of the English crown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

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  A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments

  • John R. Vile(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Rights are legitimate moral claims, or entitlements. Jefferson identified the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as human rights, because he believed that they were the birthright of individuals as human beings, whom their Creator had endowed with special dignity. When laws recognize such rights against the government, they become civil, or legal, rights. American colonists considered the freedom from taxation without representation to be an essential right of Englishmen.

  Recognition and protection of rights is a hallmark of democratic governments that respect their citizens. Americans express pride in The Bill of Rights because it guarantees expanded recognition to, and protection of, such rights and helped clarify the nation’s distinctiveness.

  Scholars generally agree that rights imply duties, although the U.S. Constitution is relatively silent about them. At a minimum, one’s exercise of such rights as freedom of speech and religion requires a negative duty not to interfere with such rights for others. Reasonably, individuals who desire the protection of a jury trial should be willing to serve as jurors for others desiring the same right, and citizens who wanted to be treated with due process should abide by the rule of law.

  The framers phrased most rights in the first ten amendments in fairly broad terms, but most rights are limited. The freedom to believe what one wants may be one of the few important absolute rights. It is absolute because it remains internal. Those who exercise other rights generally find that if they push them beyond their natural limits, they end up harming others. An old adage states that one’s right to shadowbox ends where another’s nose begins. The framers of The Bill of Rights, and subsequent interpreters, have often distinguished liberty from license.

  The twenty-seven different rights that the first ten amendments to the Constitution guarantee are political rights. Twentieth-century constitutions directed increased attention to social and economic rights. The constitutions of Mexico and the former Soviet Union, for example, granted—although they did not always deliver—such rights as a minimum wage, the right to an education, and guaranteed paid vacations. With these guarantees, such constitutions tend to be significantly longer than that of the United States. Some advocates of such rights have convincingly argued that political rights will mean little to people who are starving, suffering severe economic deprivation, or who lack adequate education or health care. At the same time, written guarantees of such economic rights mean little if the society offering them does not have the will or the wherewithal to finance them, and some nations that list social and economic rights list them more as aspirations than as judicially enforceable provisions.

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  The Emergence of One American Nation

  The Revolution, the Founders, and the Constitution

  • Donald J Fraser(Author)
  • 0(Publication Date)
  • Fraser & Associates

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 12

  The Bill of Rights / July 1789 to December 1791

  “Congress shall make no law…”

  – FIRST AMENDMENT –

  N ational Public Radio personality Peter Sagal produced a PBS series on the Constitution in 2013. In the second installment, he said, “Ask anybody on the street about the meaning of the Constitution and they will give you a one word answer: freedom.” But the Constitution does not mention the word freedom anywhere. The first ten amendments, known as The Bill of Rights, rectified this problem. For many Americans, the protections contained in The Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech, religion, and press; the right to bear arms; the provision for jury trials; and other protections of civil liberties, are the very heart of the American Constitution.

  Madison Changes His Mind on a Bill of Rights

  James Madison had gradually changed his mind. Originally opposed to adding an enumeration of rights to the Constitution, Madison remained silent when George Mason proposed one at the end of the Federal Convention. During the Virginia ratification process, he had acquiesced to the need for amendments, but only after the Constitution was approved. At that point, he was still personally opposed to such amendments, largely because he believed they would be ineffective in protecting rights. But in June of 1789, Madison proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution in the first Congress, most of which dealt with rights.

  Madison’s evolving views on the subject resulted from several factors. Jefferson’s insistence on the need for a bill of rights played a part, as did practical politics. To get elected to the House of Representatives, Madison promised his constituents he would support a bill of rights. Another part of his support was based on his view of the dangers of a second Constitutional Convention, which he hoped to forestall by offering amendments to the Constitution. He knew the Antifederalists would use a second convention not just to add an enumeration of rights, but to weaken the federal government. Most importantly, Madison became a fervent supporter of adding a bill of rights because he saw it as a way to create national unity. The struggle for ratification had been divisive, and he knew that the union would not long endure if half of the people opposed it.

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  The Conscience of the Campus

  Case Studies in Moral Reasoning Among Today's College Students

  • Joseph Dillon Davey, Linda DuBois Davey(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 The Bill of Rights How is justice best served by the judicial interpretation of things like the "establishment clause/' the "equal protection clause," and the "due process clause?" There is probably no more respected symbol of American liberty than The Bill of Rights. Cobbled together by the framers after lengthy debate in the sweltering heat of the summer of 1789, the first ten amendments to the Constitution were ratified by the states in 1791. A good indica- tion of the extraordinary stability of the U.S. system of government is that, over the past two centuries, there have only been another seven- teen changes in the Constitution ratified, and two of them canceled each other out. (Some very thirsty voters repealed the Prohibition amendment in 1933.) The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment have been in- volved in far more of the 10,000 cases that the U.S. Supreme Court has heard than all the rest of the Constitution. They have also been at the heart of innumerable political issues that have troubled the nation throughout its history. Most often, the issue involves a dispute between 64 The Conscience of the Campus an individual who claims a constitutional right to do something that the government claims the right to prohibit. The opinion of today's college students about the proper resolution of these disputes says a lot about the moral values that these students support most strongly. In this chapter, we shall consider just three clauses from The Bill of Rights—the establishment clause of xhc First Amendment, the equal pro- tection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT The very first clause of the First Amendment agreed upon by the framers of The Bill of Rights was not the right to free speech, or press, or assembly, or even the right to freely exercise one's religion. It was the prohibition on the establishment of religion.

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  Fundamental Rights

  History of a Constitutional Doctrine

  • Milton Konvitz(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Bill of Rights: A Bill of Fundamental Rights

  I.

  We have seen that, despite rebuffs, Justices of the Supreme Court, time and again in strong dissenting opinions, affirmed their belief that fundamental rights are privileges and immunities guaranteed by the Constitution against denial or abridgment by the States. What are these fundamental rights? Perhaps the fullest and broadest enumeration of such rights was formulated by Justice Bradley in Slaughter-House. 1 His dissenting opinion is historically notable, however, for another reason, for we find in it, for the first time, the contention that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment somehow “incorporates” the first eight amendments of the Constitution, that the rights enumerated in The Bill of Rights are

  among the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or what is still stronger for the force of the argument, the rights of all persons whether citizens or not.

  Since Justice Bradley made this contention in 1873, it has had an erratic career in constitutional jurisprudence, and has been disputed and refined, but the essence of Justice Bradley’s idea has won out and has become firmly fixed as constitutional doctrine. We can trace here only the main lines of this highly significant aspect of the idea of fundamental rights.

  Three years later, in 1876, the Court decided, what was perhaps the first case in which the claim was explicitly made, that one of the provisions of The Bill of Rights formulated a privilege or an immunity which a State may not infringe. In Walker v. Sauvinet, 2

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  The Politics of Human Rights in Australia

  • Louise Chappell, John Chesterman, Lisa Hill(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For Alston, any effective bill of rights must have three characteristics Chapter 3: A Bill of Rights? 65 1 a concern with protecting a range of specific rights 2 provision for an effective remedy of rights infringements 3 resilience to arbitrary change. In his view [A] bill of rights is a formal commitment to the protection of those human rights which are considered, at that moment in history, to be of particular importance. It is, in principle, binding upon the government and can be overridden, if at all, only with significant difficulty. Some form of redress is provided in the event that violations occur. (1999, 10) This definition provides a clear standard for identifying authentic bills of rights, be they constitutionally entrenched or legislatively based; such a def-inition is methodologically useful for comparing the nature and operation of these instruments across different institutional settings. For many Australians, the idea of a bill of rights evokes thoughts of an American-style charter, something that tends to distort arguments about the advisability of adopting a bill of rights for Australia. In fact, the most commonly known model – the US Bill of Rights – is in many respects unique; it is constitutionally entrenched, which means that the amendments to the US Constitution that comprise The Bill of Rights form part of a document that is the highest law of the land. The Bill is intentionally very difficult to change. Most of the amendments were added to the Constitution in 1791, with subsequent rights added after the American Civil War to incorporate former slaves, and in the early 20th century to allow women to vote. But aside from these changes, it can be argued that the US Bill of Rights is frozen in time. As a consequence, it now includes what many see as obsolete rights, such as the right to bear arms (Second Amendment), and is able to withstand pressure for the creation of new rights.

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  A New Constitution for Australia

  • Bede Harris(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  23 would pale into insignificance in comparison with what would happen if the courts recognised rights standing outside the text of the Constitution. Practically speaking, then, a Bill of Rights is likely to come into existence only if included in the text of the Constitution, or if found implicit in the text of the Constitution as it currently stands, although it may be doubted whether the latter option has more to offer beyond the already discovered implied freedom of expression.

  Furthermore, on a philosophical level, given that the common law reflects the prevailing norms of society (albeit as enunciated by the courts), the theory that a Bill of Rights could, or should, be founded upon the common law offers insufficient protection for rights, as it suggests that ultimately rights are dependant upon such norms, whereas an essential feature of a Bill of Rights is surely that it protects the right to engage in conduct and hold opinions which are contrary to prevailing norms. Finally, on a more practical level, the piecemeal nature of litigation means that a judge-made Bill of Rights would come into existence in an ad hoc manner, rather than as an integrated document, and, as was explained in the English case of Malone v Metropolitan Police Commissioner24 (where the court refused to create a new common law right to privacy), leaving to the courts the task of defining a Bill of Rights would impose upon them a burden which they would find it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to discharge.

  2.3 ARGUMENTS AGAINST A BILL OF RIGHTS

  Assuming then that the law as it currently stands does not provide adequate protection to human rights, it would seem that the case for a Bill of Rights is incontrovertible, and that The Bill of Rights should protect freedoms from infringement not only by the Commonwealth government but also by the governments of the States and Territories. Yet, the issue of whether Australia should have a Bill of Rights has engendered a significant body of debate.25

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  Constitutions and Religious Freedom

  • Frank B. Cross(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  While we should not presume that constitutional rights ensure freedom, neither should we dismiss the possibility. Nations continue to create written constitutions, so they apparently see some functional value to the practice. A constitution may be simply aspirational, setting out the nation’s ideals, with little expectation they would be put into practice (just as the religious may devote themselves to the ideals of their belief system, even as they commonly fall short in practice). Alternatively, a constitution might be adopted for symbolic purposes, to raise a nation’s stature or respect in the world community or perhaps to attract foreign capital (Law 2010). The value of rights recognition is highly uncertain. Madison (1789) stated that the inclu- sion of The Bill of Rights would not be “altogether useless,” which is scarcely high praise. The remainder of this chapter considers the theories and evidence on the potential value of specific bill-of-rights protections generally, with a focus on freedom of religion. It is surely safe to say that a constitution is not a perfect guaran- tee of rights. Historically, and today, various nations have had paper protections that were not respected in practice. In other cases, such as Australia, human rights are well protected without any rights 107 Constitutions and Religious Freedom provisions in a constitution (Ginsburg 2010). But this comparison is too binary. The important issue is whether constitutional guarantees of rights offer some net protection at the margin. Australia, without any bill of rights, may illustrate this. The Australian high court has rejected claims of religious conscientious objectors, permitted govern- ment funding of religious schools, and permitted a prohibition on the ability of Aboriginal children from exercising tribal religions (Babie & Rochow 2010). The presence of constitutional bill-of-rights protections might have produced different outcomes in these cases.

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  British Government and the Constitution

  Text and Materials

  • Colin Turpin, Adam Tomkins(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Among these statutes are certain great constitutional Acts which were enacted in confirmation of the results of political upheaval or revolution, or as emphatic statements of what were conceived as fundamental rights or privi- leges. The antiquity of these Acts, the great historical events with which they are 162 British Government and the Constitution associated, or the lasting worth of the principles contained in them – or a com- bination of these features – have invested them with a kind of sanctity (in the minds of lawyers and to some extent in public sentiment) which is not unlike that elsewhere attaching to written constitutions. They include Magna Carta 1215, the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, The Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Settlement 1701, the Act of Union with Scotland 1707 and the Statute of Westminster 1931. The Human Rights Act may in time take its place among them. The following extracts are taken from The Bill of Rights 1689: [The] Lords Spirituall and Temporall and Commons pursuant to their respective Letters and Elections being now assembled in a full and free Representative of this Nation . . . Does in the first place (as their Ancestors in like Case have usually done) for the Vindicating and Asserting their ancient Rights and Liberties, Declare That the pretended Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regal Authority without Consent of Parliament is illegal. That the pretended Power of Dispensing with Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regal Authority as it hath been assumed and exercised of late is illegal. ...That levying Money for or to the Use of the Crown by pretence of Prerogative without Grant of Parliament . . . is illegal. ...That the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace unless it be with Consent of Parliament is against Law. That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.

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  Religion and the State in American Law

  • Boris I. Bittker, Scott C. Idleman, Frank S. Ravitch(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  An important early commentator deduced from this difference in constitutional lan- guage that the less explicit provisions of The Bill of Rights “are to be more generally con- strued, and considered as applying to the state legislatures as well as that of the Union.” 308 This expansive interpretation was rejected, however, in 1833, when the Supreme Court ruled in Barron v. Baltimore, per Chief Justice Marshall, that the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause (and, by implication, the rest of the vaguely aimed provisions of The Bill of Rights) restricted only the federal government: The Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves, for their own government, and not for the government of the individual States. Each State established a constitution for itself, and in that constitution pro- vided such limitations and restrictions on the powers of its particular government as its judgment dictated. The people of the United States framed such a government for the United States as they supposed best adapted to their situation, and best calculated to promote their interests. The powers they conferred on this government were to be 306 Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303 (1940). 307 For the “lost amendment,” see supra note 223 and accompanying text. 308 William Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (2d ed., H. C. Carey 1829). I. Application of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment to the States 65 exercised by itself; and the limitations on power, if expressed in general terms, are natu- rally, and, we think, necessarily applicable to the government created by the instrument. They are limitations of power granted in the instrument itself; not of distinct govern- ments, framed by different persons and for different purposes. If these propositions be correct, the fifth amendment must be understood as restrain- ing the power of the general government, not as applicable to the States.

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  Inherent Rights, the Written Constitution, and Popular Sovereignty

  The Founders' Understanding

  • Thomas B. McAffee(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  4 Based on their ratificationera arguments, neither group would have contended that written protections contribute only the additional security of explicitness in defining the natural rights or the certainty that a particular right would be included. The debate had an air of artificiality about it precisely because, as a purely legal debate, it often ignored the real wellsprings of motivation of the parties, as for example the Constitution supporters’ apparent concerns about the potential divisions that might become associated with drafting and adopting a bill of rights or their suspicion that many critics saw the issue as a stalking horse for more fundamental grounds of opposition. The context of a ratification struggle no doubt influenced the debate as well. Thus some defenders of the Constitution were deep skeptics of the value of a bill of rights, but these views were not given the same emphasis as the legal arguments because they understood that bills of rights in general were extremely popular in America. THE WRITTEN CONSTITUTION AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE POPULAR SOVEREIGN For American constitutional law to develop, as Gerald Stourzh has observed, it was essential for fundamental law to make a transition to enforceable constitutional law inasmuch as the functioning eighteenthcentury British constitution had come to recognize “certain imperatives or prohibitions as fundamental elements of the laws of the land without thereby creating a special category of legal norms.” 5 Although England’s doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty should not be confused with the idea that such fundamental law principles have no significance in their political and constitutional order, 6 it is the special category of “constitutional” norms that bind even the legislature that most clearly distinguishes American from British constitutionalism.

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