US Bill of Rights

10 Key excerpts on "US Bill of Rights"

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  U.S. Constitution For Dummies

  • Michael Arnheim(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Part IV The Bill of Rights: Specifying Rights through Amendments

  In this part . . .

  Here’s where you get the lowdown on your constitutional rights. The Bill of Rights may have been an afterthought as far as the Framers of the Constitution were concerned, but for most people these first ten amendments are crucial. Read all about them here.

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter 14 The First Amendment: Freedom of Religion, Speech, and Assembly In This Chapter Establishing freedom of religion Protecting freedom of speech responsibly Guarding against obscenity Protecting freedom of assembly and association

  The First Amendment forms part of the Bill of Rights — the name we give to the first ten amendments. The First Amendment is arguably the most important part not only of the Bill of Rights but also of the Constitution as a whole because it guarantees some pretty fundamental rights:

  Freedom of religion and belief Freedom of speech Freedom of the press Freedom of assembly and association Freedom to petition the government In this chapter, I explain each of these rights and how they’ve been interpreted through the years. Considering the Amendment’s Wording Here’s what the First Amendment says:

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  Prohibiting Congress from taking away rights

  Notice the unusual wording. The whole amendment is governed by the opening phrase “Congress shall make no law . . .” No other amendment starts that way. How come the First Amendment differs from all the other amendments in this important respect?

  The answer is that in this amendment the Framers were not granting new rights to the people. They assumed that those rights already existed. The amendment was clearly designed to stop Congress from taking away rights that already existed.

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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 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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  U.S. Constitution For Dummies

  • Michael Arnheim(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Part 4

  Guaranteeing Important Rights: The Bill of Rights

  IN THIS PART … Gain knowledge about your constitutional rights. Speak up! Find out about your right to freedom of speech as well as religion and assembly. Find out about the right to bear arms and prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure. Uncover what “Pleading the Fifth” is really all about. Understand your right to a fair trial and a trial by jury plus the regulation of cruel and unusual punishment. Note the Ninth Amendment — a guide on how to interpret the Constitution — and tackle the Tenth Amendment — described by Thomas Jefferson as “the foundation of the Constitution.” Passage contains an image

  Chapter 14

  The First Amendment: Freedom of Religion, Speech, and Assembly

  IN THIS CHAPTER

  Examining the text of the First Amendment

  Establishing freedom of religion

  Safeguarding freedom of speech responsibly

  Protecting national secrets

  Assuring freedom of assembly and association

  The First Amendment forms part of the Bill of Rights — the name we give to the first ten amendments. The First Amendment is arguably the most important part not only of the Bill of Rights but also of the Constitution as a whole because it guarantees some pretty fundamental rights:

  • Freedom of religion and belief
  • Freedom of speech
  • Freedom of the press
  • Freedom of assembly and association
  • Freedom to petition the government

  In this chapter, I explain each of these rights and how they’ve been interpreted through the years.

  Considering the Amendment’s Wording

  Here’s what the First Amendment says:

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a

  redress of grievances.

  Prohibiting Congress from taking away rights

  Notice the unusual wording. The whole amendment is governed by the opening phrase “Congress shall make no law …” No other amendment starts that way. How come the First Amendment differs from all the other amendments in this important respect?

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  A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments

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

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 7

  THE BILL OF RIGHTS —THE FIRST AMENDMENT

  The first ten amendments to the Constitution are commonly designated as the Bill of Rights. Congress proposed these amendments in 1789, and the required number of states ratified them in 1791. In addition to protecting civil liberties and the rights of the states, these amendments provide further insight into the values of those who wrote the Constitution and the controversies surrounding its ratification.

  BACKGROUND

  Debates over the proposed Constitution split the nation into two camps. Federalists supported the new Constitution, and Anti-Federalists opposed it. Anti-Federalists feared that the new national government was too strong—so strong that it would abuse personal rights. Federalists argued that the structure of the new national government would restrain it from acting oppressively, and that it could only exercise the powers the Constitution delegated to it. Despite such assurances, Anti-Federalists continued to insist on binding the new national government, as they had bound their own state governments, by additional written restraints. As he argued in letters to his friend James Madison, Thomas Jefferson argued that a bill of rights might help secure liberties after the Constitution (which he supported) went into effect.

  Eventually, prominent Federalists agreed to support a bill of rights if the states ratified the Constitution. James Madison, who represented a Virginia district in the U.S. House of Representatives, took the lead in shaping the Bill of Rights and getting it through the first Congress. Madison saw adoption of the Bill of Rights as a way of avoiding a second constitutional convention. He sought to guarantee individual rights without diluting the strength of the new national government through amendments that would alter the structure of the new government. Although some Anti-Federalists were clearly committed to civil liberties, others used fears that the government would abuse individual rights as a smokescreen to oppose a more powerful national government.

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  American Government and Politics Today

  The Essentials, Enhanced

  • Barbara Bardes, Mack Shelley, Steffen Schmidt, , Barbara Bardes, Mack Shelley, Steffen Schmidt(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  4 These six LEARNING OUTCOMES below are designed to help improve your understanding of this chapter: 1: Identify the rights listed in the original Constitution, describe the Bill of Rights, and discuss how it came to be applied to state governments as well as the national government. 2: Explain how the First Amendment’s establishment clause and free exercise clause guarantee our freedom of religion. 3: Specify the limited circumstances in which the national and state governments may override the principles of free speech and freedom of the press. 4: Provide the constitutional basis of the right to privacy, and explain how the principle has been applied to the abortion and right-to-die controversies. 5: Cite examples of how recent security concerns have affected our civil liberties. 6: Identify the constitutional rights of those who are accused of a crime, explain the Miranda and exclusionary rules, and describe the current status of the death penalty. CIVIL LIBERTIES Protesters demon-strate outside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters in support of Apple Inc. The agency was attempting to force Apple to write software that would break the security system on an iPhone. How would you weigh the right to privacy against the need to gain information about terrorists? Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 85 What if... Background The Bill of Rights and other provisions of the U.S. Constitution are the ultimate protections of our civil rights and liberties. But how do these rights work in practice? How do we determine what our rights are in any given situation? One way is through judicial review, the power of the United States Supreme Court or other courts to declare laws and other acts of government unconstitutional. Supreme Court cases are often hotly con-tested, and the decision in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade is one of the most contentious ever handed down.

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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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  Rights and Private Law

  • Donal Nolan, Andrew Robertson(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  This is evident even in the titles of the legislation, which would oth-erwise seem strangely imprecise. On its face, a Bill of Rights is a statute that presents all our rights: a Bill (ie, statute) of our rights. Similarly, a Human Rights Act would appear to be a piece of legislation that con-tains all the rights that human beings have. But, of course, these statutes possess only a minute subset of such rights. Why, then, do we feel no need to refer to these pieces of legislation as Bills of Some Rights, Partial Human Rights Acts, and Charters of a Few Rights and Freedoms? The answer is that these Acts are believed to contain, not all rights, but the rights: the fundamental rights in both senses of the term. It is also widely held that these rights concern, at least in the first instance, the entitlements that individuals hold vis-a-vis the state. Typi-cally, they are understood to demand legislative and other governmental restraint. For instance, the right to freedom of religion is conceptualised as a prohibition on governmental action that would prevent people holding and practising their preferred religious beliefs. It might also be thought to support certain forms of government action, for example action needed to protect minority religions. 2 These rights, then, belong to public law in the broad sense of that term. As indicated earlier, this view is not unique to lawyers. In fact, it did not originate with lawyers. Rather, it is widely accepted that these ideas 1 This claim is normative, not historical. Of course, the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) did not exist before 1998. The idea, however, is that now that it is in force, it is founda-tional in the senses explained. Also, perhaps before it was in force, the norms it contains were also foundational. 2 See, eg, the judgment of L’Hereux-Dubé J in Adler v Ontario [1996] 3 SCR 609.

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  The Constitution of South Africa

  A Contextual Analysis

  • Heinz Klug(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Publishing

    (Publisher)

  To this end, the Bill of Rights addresses some of the most egregious consequences of the legally imposed inequalities of the past—such as access to land ownership. It also adopts a broad definition of equality that includes provisions that protect affirmative action as a mechanism to deal with this legacy. In addition to prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, age and ethnic origin, the Bill of Rights also lists the following categories of protection: pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, disability and language. Furthermore, in cases of alleged discrimination on any of the listed grounds, such discrimination is assumed to be unfair, thus shifting the burden of proof onto those denying that the prima facie effect of discrimination is not the consequence of their actions. Finally, these constitutional protections are not limited to relations between the state and individuals; they are applied to both governmental and private conduct, with the Constitution mandating the legislature to enact laws to prevent or prohibit unfair private discrimination. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted in February 2000 to fulfil this constitutional mandate is a wide-ranging statute that aims to eradicate social and economic inequalities, ‘especially those that are systematic in nature, which are generated in our history by colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy, and which brought pain and suffering to the great majority of our people’. 8 The state is explicitly charged with the duty to ‘respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights’. 9 Yet it is important to recognise that the rights guaranteed are subject to limitations, which the Bill of Rights explicitly provides. While it is commonly understood that no rights are absolute—and that one person’s rights might indeed interfere with the exercise of another person’s—the Constitution does not simply leave the policing of these boundaries to the courts

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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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