RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

Rights and Freedoms

Rights and Freedoms

a) The Freedom Guaranteed to US citizens in the First Amendment to the Constitution

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution are denoted as the “Bill of Rights”. These provisions, although considered a fundamental and inseparable part of the modern-day Constitution, were not included in the document when it was originally ratified in 1789.2 In fact, some of the constitutional framers deemed such a supplemental list of rights to be unnecessary for, and perhaps even harmful to, protecting individual rights and liberties.

Some people may be tempted to read the Bill of Rights in much the same manner as they would read the Articles of the Constitution—as an exhaustive and restrictive list of provisions, that are not to be added to or modified without formal amendment. But there are reasons to be cautious about equating the drafting strategies employed to write the Articles of the Constitution with those used to write the Bill of Rights. (Labunski 2008)

The Articles were designed to be a document that limited government, with the powers and duties delegated to the newly formed government designed to be exhaustive and exclusive. Note, for example, Article I, section 8, which provides an itemized (although, in some cases, vaguely worded) list of the powers vested in Congress—the power to regulate commerce, to coin money, to declare war, to establish post offices, and so on. The purpose of providing this detailed list was to ensure limited government, thereby making it known that if Congress was not constitutionally vested with a particular power, it was barred from exercising it. This drafting technique is captured in the Latin maxim “inclusio unis est exclusio alterius,” which means the inclusion of one item is the exclusion of all others. Under this theory, the framers maintained that they could limit the scope and power of government by enumerating or listing the government's specific powers in the constitution, and that such documentation, by implication, would curtail any subsequent argument that the government had powers beyond those listed in the constitution. So essentially, the framers theorized that if they went to the trouble of delegating specific powers to the three branches of government, all other forms of power not specifically mentioned, would be excluded. Indeed, the Tenth Amendment reinforces this principle by providing that those powers not given to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people. (Labunski 2008)

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