Civil liberties are legal and constitutional rights that protect citizens from government actions. As well, civil liberties are limitations on government action, setting forth what the government cannot do. The Bill of Rights which is (the first ten amendments to the Constitution)contained many of our liberties ratified in 1791. Nonetheless,the original constitution did not include safeguards to protect citizens against an overly powerful government, such as the writ of habeas corpus. For many years, the courts assumed that the Bill of Rights limited only the actions of the national government, not those of the states. Over time, the United States Supreme Court began using the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to say that the states
