The Innumerable Number Nine: An Essay on the Rank of the Original Ten U.S.A. Amendments As the song goes, “In 1787 I’m told our Founding Fathers did agree, to write a list of principles for keepin’ people free” (Ahrens Scholastic.com). This is referring of course to the Constitution of the United States, written by James Madison to, as the lyric states, set up laws to enforce freedom. In fact as James Madison himself stated “Equal laws protecting equal rights… the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country” (Madison Goodreads.com). Thus, it should be no surprise he would propose the Bill of Rights, a set of ten Amendments to the Constitution that protect rights. There has been much debate about which of these is the most important, many
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The author/historian Daniel A. Farber wrote an entire book about this topic entitled Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have. He states “The Ninth Amendment bears directly on modern-day constitutional issues such as abortion, the right to die, and gay rights” (Farber Alternet). He then explains how the Bill of Rights is not defining rights, but acknowledging some of them. This means if there is a basic right, it is protected by the Ninth Amendment. One of these protected rights is the right to privacy, demonstrated perfectly in the Supreme Court Case Roe vs. Wade. For a brief background, a woman Roe was pregnant and wanted an abortion for safety reasons but was against a Texas law. She argued this was against the marital privacy already established to be protected by the Ninth Amendment, the District court ruled in her favor, and the case went to the Supreme Court. Justice Harry Blackmun ruled “with respect to the requests for a declaratory judgment, abstention was not warranted. On the merits, the District Court held that the fundamental right of single women and married persons to choose whether to have children is protected by the Ninth Amendment, through the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were void on their face because they were both unconstitutionally vague and constituted an overbroad infringement of the plaintiffs' Ninth Amendment rights” (Blackmun LII). This is one example, but any right not in the Bill of Rights is protected in this manner, strong enough to decide a state law was
The author/historian Daniel A. Farber wrote an entire book about this topic entitled Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have. He states “The Ninth Amendment bears directly on modern-day constitutional issues such as abortion, the right to die, and gay rights” (Farber Alternet). He then explains how the Bill of Rights is not defining rights, but acknowledging some of them. This means if there is a basic right, it is protected by the Ninth Amendment. One of these protected rights is the right to privacy, demonstrated perfectly in the Supreme Court Case Roe vs. Wade. For a brief background, a woman Roe was pregnant and wanted an abortion for safety reasons but was against a Texas law. She argued this was against the marital privacy already established to be protected by the Ninth Amendment, the District court ruled in her favor, and the case went to the Supreme Court. Justice Harry Blackmun ruled “with respect to the requests for a declaratory judgment, abstention was not warranted. On the merits, the District Court held that the fundamental right of single women and married persons to choose whether to have children is protected by the Ninth Amendment, through the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were void on their face because they were both unconstitutionally vague and constituted an overbroad infringement of the plaintiffs' Ninth Amendment rights” (Blackmun LII). This is one example, but any right not in the Bill of Rights is protected in this manner, strong enough to decide a state law was