The Bill of Rights, the collective name…
December 1791 CE
The Bill of Rights, the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, serve to protect the natural rights of liberty and property.
They guarantee a number of personal freedoms, limit the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and reserve some powers to the states and the public.
Introduced by James Madison to the 1st United States Congress as a series of legislative articles, the amendments had been adopted by the House of Representatives on August 21, 1789, formally proposed by joint resolution of Congress on September 25, 1789, and come into effect as Constitutional Amendments on December 15, 1791, through the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States.
While twelve amendments have been passed by Congress, only ten are originally passed by the states.
Of the remaining two, one will be adopted in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the other technically remains pending before the states.
The original Bill of Rights legally protects only white men, excluding African Americans and women.
However, these limitations are not explicit in the Bill of Right's text.
It will take additional Constitutional Amendments and numerous Supreme Court cases to extend the same rights to all U.S. citizens.
The Bill of Rights plays a key role in American law and government, and remains a vital symbol of the freedoms and culture of the nation.
One of the first fourteen copies of the Bill of Rights is on public display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C..
While originally the amendments apply only to the federal government, by way of the Fourteenth Amendment (July 1868), most of their provisions will since be held to apply to the states.
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Northern North America
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