Retained by the People: The "Silent" Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have

Front Cover
Basic Books, 2007 M08 1 - 256 pages
The Ninth Amendment lurks like an unexploded mine within the Bill of Rights. Its wording is direct: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." However, there is not a single Supreme Court decision based on it. Even the famously ambitious Warren Court preferred to rely on the weaker support of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause for many of its decisions on individual rights. Since that era, mainstream conservatives have grown actively hostile to the very mention of the Ninth Amendment. Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, makes an informed and lucid argument for employing the Ninth Amendment in support of a large variety of rights whose constitutional basis is now shaky. The case he makes for the application of this unused amendment has profound implications in almost every aspect of our daily lives.
 

Contents

Whos Afraid of the Ninth Amendment?
1
Unwritten Rights and the Constitution
21
Madisons Solution
39
After the Ninth
45
Natural Law and the Antislavery
53
A New Birth of Freedom
61
Protecting Fundamental Rights
71
Fundamental Rights Today
85
Gay Rights
131
Education
145
The Right to Government Protection
155
The Right to Travel and Other Rights
161
Fundamental Rights and
175
Joining the Rest of the World
183
The Ninth Amendment and the Future
197
Glossary of Legal Terminology
212

An Invitation to Activism?
93
A Users Guide to
101
Reproductive Rights
111
The End of Life
121

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Page 12 - It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

About the author (2007)

Daniel Farber earned his J.D. from the University of Illinois. He clerked for Judge Philip W. Tone of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. He is one of the ten most frequently cited American legal scholars. Currently teaching at the UC-Berkeley Law School, he lives in Oakland, California.

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