BILL OF RIGHTS AMENDMENTS

Bill of Rights Amendments

Abstract

The Bill of Rights consists of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights fulfilled a campaign pledge made by supporters of the new charter during the debate over ratification in 1787 and 1788. When opponents depicted the powerful national government as a threat to individual liberties, the Federalist supporters including James Madison, promised to add a bill of rights once the Constitution ratified. As a member of the House of Representatives, Madison played the major role in drafting the amendments and winning approval for them from the First Congress in 1789. Ratification by the necessary number of states completed two years later, on December 15, 1791. This paper analyzes the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. It also discusses the relationship between these parts of the Bill of Rights and the administration of justice and security.

Bill of Rights Amendments

Introduction

A bill of rights is an official statement of the basic human rights within a specific area. Its rationale is to defend those rights from any untrustworthy applied actions, unfair, or arbitrary by the administration. While such statements sometimes promulgated by legislative enactments, most usually a bill of rights is part of a nation's constitution. A bill of rights in a constitution seeks to immunize them from infringement by legislation and other governmental policies, and thereby to set limits on governmental actions on behalf of human rights (Schwartz 2007, 63-65).

Discussion

For US citizens, the Bill of Rights means the first ten Amendments to the US Constitution. As originally planned the Constitution did not contain a list of citizens' rights against the state, largely because the framers of the Constitution judged that they had already sufficiently limited the powers of the central government. Before the Constitution could come into effect; however, it had to be ratified by the several states, and there was considerable opposition to ratifying the document without any overt limitation on government power.

Several states refused outright to ratify without the firm promise of a bill of rights. Consequently James Madison, one of the original theorists of the Constitution, drew up a draft bill of rights on his first election to Congress in 1789, which, in amended form, passed by Congress. Two years later in 1791, the Amendments ratified by all member states (Cornell 1999 25-30).

Roles of the Federal, State, and Local Court Systems and Public Safety & Civil Rights

Originally the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government. Not only did the states have versions of their own, but several had institutions, for example, established Churches, actually prohibited by the Bill of Rights. Not until after the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did a slow process of incorporation begin to apply the contents of the Bill of Rights to the separate states, a process not completed until the 1960s.

The Ten Amendments (listed in the Bill as articles, but normally referred to as amendments) cover a wide range of the most important ...