Discussion of the Bill of Rights

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Discussion of the Bill of Rights

When the work of the Constitutional convention was completed in the September of 1787, the document that they submitted for ratification by the people never included within it a bill of rights. The lack of reserved powers and rights enumeration between the Americans proved to be the main source of conflict since they had for long been used to the idea that declarations like these were necessary to prevent the government from abusing the people’s liberties. In the ratification debates held by the state after the conventions, federalists who supported and those against the constitution offered their opinions and arguments for or against the additions in the constitution and the bill of rights. There was a belief among the federalists that it was not necessary to add the bill of rights since to them it presented a danger to the peoples liberties. On the other hand anti-federalists raised their objections to the constitution; since they claimed that if there were no reserved rights declaration, the people could no longer claim to be free, even if they were living under a well constructed system of governance that harbored good intentions. with this understanding Virginian James Madison in 1789 submitted to congress twelve amendments his main aim was to address the anti-federalists criticism, his submissions were all ratified except for two of them mainly one that prevented members of the House from raising their own salaries until after an election had occurred and one that authorized the enlargement of the House of Representatives. The ten amendments that remained are what came to be known as the Bill of Rights which came to be ratified in 1791.

The passing of the 14th amendment in 1868 established a restructuring of the state government’s powers that deprived individuals of liberties and civil rights. The Supreme Court recently has ruled that the current 14th Amendment is absorbed and incorporated in most of Rights as described in the federal Bill provisions and due to this the rights it can be applied to state. However before the amendment of the 14th law, the passing of the Bill of rights was mainly meant to restrict the federal government’s actions. Supreme Court’s decision on the (1833) Barron v. Baltimore case clearly confirmed these common understandings, which stated that the amendment of the 5th enactment could not be used to implement any limits on a local or state government from acquiring private property without fist offering any compensation to the private property owners. According to Barron’s explanation of, the 1st Amendment freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, press and petition for example states that the ruling only applies to the federal government, and not in any way applicable to the state government, since it is allowed to maintain its initial powers to address these and any current issues in line with their own statutes and constitutions (Cortner, 2).

Incorporation theory can be used to refer to the state law absorption under the Bill of Rights or U.S. Constitution specific protections. However, the described implications are complex in that the U.S. Constitution should be allowed to override all state laws and state constitutions. This implies that the Bill of Rights described under the amendments 1-10, were included into the 14th amendment while it was being passed. As stated in the 14th amendment that no state shall deprive any citizen of liberty, life or property without following due process. In this understanding the definition of liberty can be seen as encompassing the first 10 amendment and not until the 14th amendment could the federal governments not restrict free speech which is described under the 1st amendment under which the state governments are not bound to similar standards.

The Court’s implementation of nationalization or corporation of the Bill of Rights is the process by which states have portions of the U.S. Bill of Rights applied to them by the American courts. Before 1925, the Bill of Rights was thought to apply only to the federal government. Under the incorporation, most of the Bill of rights provisions have extended to now apply to the local government and the state. Prior to the fourteenth amendment ratifications and the incorporation doctrine development, the 1833 Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore that the Bill of Rights was only applicable to the federal government but not the state governments.

The court had made the rights decision by interpreting the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment since within its implementation it can be said that the true definition of being a US citizen are incorporated since, it has successfully protected the peoples rights. In my view the three major clauses that are found in the amendment are still relevant today in that the equal protection clause, the citizenship clause and the due process clause all independently help better the lives of the citizens and help remove or reduce segregation or discrimination within the state in the south and this makes it a good idea to limit the states action with regards to individual liberties as expressed in the Bill of Rights (Gabriel,6).

Work Cited

Chin, Gabriel J.; Abraham, Anjali. “Beyond the Supermajority: Post-Adoption Ratification of the Equality Amendments”. Arizona Law Review, press, 2008

Richard Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of the Bill of Rights, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009