Bill Of Rights Pros And Cons

The Bill of Rights, or the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, was created by James Madison on the twenty-fifth of September in 1789. It was ratified two years later on December 15th, and it essentially guarantees the freedoms and rights of the citizens of the United States. It also places explicit boundaries in cases involving governmental function and provides definitive limitations to Congress’ power, stressing that any power not mandated to the Congress by the Constitution be reserved for the states or the people.

The U.S. Bill of Rights initially applied explicitly to the Federal government and not the state governments. Before 1925, the bill did not pertain to states or other entities of government because of the case Barron v. Baltimore (1833), which had the Supreme Court decide that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government and that states were free to enforce statutes that restricted rights itemized in the Bill. On June 8th of 1925 however, the Supreme Court made a decision in a landmark case reversing the 1833 ruling: the case of Gitlow v. New York was an early major First Amendment case that was brought before the Supreme Court. It involved the Court relying on the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process clause,”

Selective incorporation is the incremental incorporation of a few rights listed in the Bill of Rights at a time, and there were some in the justice department who were for this ever-so-slight, gradual incorporation. Around 1908, there was a very minor opinion-clash involving Justice Frankfurter, who was of the opinion that the incorporation process should be incremental, Justice Moody, who was of the same opinion, and Justice Hugo Black, who believed that total incorporation of rights should apply to both the federal government and all