The Bill of Rights, Amendment by Amendment

The Constitution left Philadelphia in 1787 without a bill of rights, and that omission nearly sank it. Several states ratified only after being assured that amendments would follow. The first Congress kept the bargain. In September 1789 it proposed twelve articles of amendment to the states, and ten of them were ratified on December 15, 1791. Those ten are what we call the Bill of Rights.

Two things are worth fixing in your mind before you read them. They are short: the whole set runs to around 460 words. And as originally understood they restrained the federal government only. The story of how most of them came to bind the states as well is at the end of this page. Full transcripts are published by the National Archives.

The First Amendment

One sentence, six guarantees: no establishment of religion, free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It is the most quoted sentence in American law and the most heavily litigated.

It is also genuinely contested at the edges. The establishment clause in particular has drawn competing readings for decades. Some judges and scholars read it as requiring a strict separation between government and religion; others read it as barring only coercion or official preference, and as permitting practices with a long historical pedigree. The Supreme Court's own approach has shifted more than once. We set out the interpretive methods that sit underneath disputes like this on our page about interpretation, without endorsing any of them.

The Second Amendment

Twenty-seven words, and no clause of the Constitution is argued about more:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The long-running disagreement concerns the relationship between the two halves of that sentence. One reading treats the opening clause as stating a purpose and the operative clause as protecting an individual right. Another treats the whole amendment as tied to service in a state militia. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) the Supreme Court held that the amendment protects an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense, and in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) it held that this right applies to the states as well. Argument over the scope of that right, and over what regulation remains permissible, continues in the lower courts.

The Third Amendment

No soldier may be quartered in a private house in peacetime without the owner's consent, or in wartime except as prescribed by law. It answers a specific grievance of the 1760s and 1770s and is now the quietest provision in the document. The Supreme Court has never decided a case squarely on it. It remains a useful reminder that several of these amendments were written about particular abuses their authors had recently lived through.

The Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, together with a requirement that warrants issue only on probable cause, supported by oath, and describing particularly the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The framers' target was the general warrant, which let officers search broadly without specific suspicion. Applying eighteenth-century language to telephones, cars and cell-site location data has produced an enormous body of case law.

The Fifth Amendment

Five distinct protections in one paragraph. Grand jury indictment for serious federal crimes. No double jeopardy, meaning no second prosecution for the same offense after an acquittal or conviction. No compelled self-incrimination, which is the origin of the phrase "pleading the Fifth." No deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law. And no taking of private property for public use without just compensation.

The due process clause carries far more weight than its handful of words suggests. Everyone agrees that it requires fair procedure: notice, a chance to be heard, a decision by somebody impartial. Whether it also protects certain substantive liberties against government action regardless of the procedure used has been disputed for well over a century, and judges continue to divide on it.

The Sixth Amendment

The rights of a defendant in a criminal case: a speedy and public trial, an impartial jury drawn from the state and district where the crime occurred, notice of the accusation, the right to confront opposing witnesses, compulsory process to obtain favorable ones, and the assistance of counsel. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) the Supreme Court held that states must provide counsel to felony defendants who cannot afford one.

The Seventh Amendment

A right to jury trial in federal civil suits at common law where the amount in controversy exceeds twenty dollars, a figure that has never been adjusted and that tells you something about how amendment works in practice. The amendment also bars re-examination of a jury's findings except according to the rules of the common law. It is one of the few provisions that has never been applied to the states.

The Eighth Amendment

No excessive bail, no excessive fines, and no cruel and unusual punishments. The last phrase does the most work and has proved hardest to pin down, since what counts as cruel and unusual has been measured by some judges against the standards of 1791 and by others against evolving practice. The excessive fines clause was held to apply to the states in Timbs v. Indiana (2019).

The Ninth Amendment

In its entirety: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It answers an objection raised during ratification, that listing rights would imply the government could do anything not on the list. How much independent force it carries is disputed. Some read it as protecting unenumerated rights directly; others treat it as a rule of construction that limits inferences rather than creating rights of its own.

The Tenth Amendment

Powers not delegated to the United States, and not prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people. It states the structural premise of the whole design: the federal government is one of enumerated powers. What that means in any particular dispute is the recurring question of federalism.

Who the Bill of Rights binds

Originally, only the federal government. In Barron v. Baltimore (1833) the Supreme Court held that these amendments limited Congress and not the states, so a state could establish a church or abridge speech without violating them.

That changed after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) forbade any state to deprive a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, and beginning in the twentieth century the Court read that clause as making most of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states one provision at a time. The process is called incorporation. Free speech was incorporated in Gitlow v. New York (1925), and the right to counsel, the protection against unreasonable searches and most of the rest followed over the decades that came after.

"Most" is doing real work in that sentence. The Fifth Amendment's grand jury requirement has never been applied to the states, nor has the Seventh Amendment's civil jury guarantee, and the Supreme Court has never had occasion to rule on the Third. The later amendments that made incorporation possible are covered on our page about the twenty-seven amendments.

The two that did not make it in 1791

Twelve articles went to the states in 1789 and ten were ratified. One of the two left behind concerned the formula for apportioning seats in the House, and it has never been ratified. The other concerned the timing of congressional pay changes; it sat unratified for two centuries and finally became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in 1992, the longest gap in the document's history. Clause-by-clause commentary on each amendment is available in the Constitution Annotated, and Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute publishes a searchable text alongside case citations.