The Bill of Rights

The original Constitution contained few explicit protections for individual rights, and Anti-Federalists made the absence of a bill of rights a central objection during ratification. Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 84 that one was unnecessary and even dangerous, since listing some rights might imply that others were unprotected. Several states ratified only with recommendations for amendments, and James Madison, who had been skeptical, introduced proposed amendments in the House on June 8, 1789.

Congress sent twelve amendments to the states on September 25, 1789, and ten were ratified when Virginia approved them on December 15, 1791. They protect freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition, the right to keep and bear arms, freedom from quartering of soldiers, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, rights of the accused including due process, grand juries, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, speedy and public trials by jury, the assistance of counsel, civil jury trials, and protection against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve other rights and powers to the people and the states. Of the two unratified proposals, one became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992.

At first the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government, as the Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore in 1833. After the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court gradually applied most of its protections to the states through the Due Process Clause, a process called incorporation, beginning with free speech in Gitlow v. New York in 1925 and extending to the right to bear arms in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010 and the ban on excessive fines in Timbs v. Indiana in 2019. The original engrossed copy is displayed in the Rotunda of the National Archives.