Amendment IX — Rights Retained by the People

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The rights of the American people are not limited to those explicitly guaranteed in the body of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution after the Civil War, also suggests an expansive notion of rights. The impact and significance of this amendment is discussed later in objective 4.

While the notions that the rights of the people extend beyond those listed in the Constitution and that the states must respect those rights as well are not controversial. However, they do raise some difficult questions. For example, what are these “unlisted” rights and who decides which ones have the same status as the others in the Bill of Rights? While Americans are increasingly prone to speak of ordinary freedoms (such as driving a car or pursuing an education) as “rights,” are these really on the same level as the rights of speech, religion, and due process?

The Supreme Court provides the answers to these questions. In the cases that come before it alleging a constitutional right to engage in a particular behavior or to be afforded a particular benefit, the Court must determine the importance of the claim and its legitimacy in the context of the other rights and principles embodied in the Constitution.

Amendment X — Reserved Powers of the States

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

 

     

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License