Ninth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees citizens certain rights not specifically listed in the document. The amendment eased fears that the listing of some rights in the Bill of Rights would leave other unspecified rights unprotected. The amendment was the ninth of 10 amendments made to the Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights, which guarantees fundamental rights and freedoms to every citizen.
The Ninth Amendment states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The Bill of Rights.
The U.S. Constitution went into effect on June 21, 1788. Some states had refused to approve the Constitution unless a bill of rights was added. Supporters of the Constitution, known as Federalists , promised to support constitutional amendments that protected individual liberties against possible unjust rule by the national government. Congress proposed the first 10 amendments—the Bill of Rights—in 1789. The states ratified them in 1791.
Ninth Amendment protections.
The Ninth Amendment stands for the principle that individual constitutional rights are not limited to those that are written down in the Constitution. However, the amendment does not provide any indication of what those rights are. Courts have been reluctant to enforce the amendment because of its exceptionally broad meaning. In its ruling in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court of the United States determined that people have a constitutional right to privacy . Associate Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion. In his concurrence, Associate Justice Arthur J. Goldberg argued that the Ninth Amendment helped to define the “liberty” protected by the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments . (The amendments forbid the government from depriving a person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law .”)
History.
Before the framers of the Constitution adopted the Bill of Rights, two of the Constitution’s important supporters, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison , argued that the Bill of Rights was not necessary. They argued that limitations on the powers of government in the original Constitution were better protections for individual rights than a list of those rights would be. Hamilton also feared that a list of rights in the Constitution would imply that no other rights existed. Later, when Madison wrote the Bill of Rights, he added the Ninth Amendment to make it clear that the Bill of Rights did not limit individual rights but expanded them. Madison and the other framers intended the Ninth Amendment to ensure that the Bill of Rights did not limit the range of fundamental human rights that governments cannot violate—even if such rights are not listed in the Constitution.
