Why the Bill of Rights Is Important: The Historic and Legal Significance of Each Amendment (1991)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 27 Apr 2016
• views: 177

Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author, attorney, and diplomat who is currently the United States Ambassador to Japan. She is a prominent member of the Kennedy family and the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. She is a niece of Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy and older sister to John F. Kennedy Jr. Caroline Kennedy was just short of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Caroline, her mother, and brother settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she attended school. Kennedy graduated from Radcliffe College and worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. She went on to receive a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. Most of Kennedy's professional life has spanned law and politics, as well as education reform and charitable work. She has also acted as a spokesperson for her family's legacy and co-authored two books on civil liberties with Ellen Alderman. In the 2008 presidential election, Kennedy and her uncle Ted endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for president early in the primary race; she later stumped for him in Florida, Indiana, and Ohio, served as co-chair of his Vice Presidential Search Committee, and addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.[5] After Obama's selection of then-Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Kennedy expressed interest in being appointed to Clinton's vacant Senate seat from New York, but she later withdrew from consideration, citing "personal reasons". In 2013, President Obama appointed her as ambassador to Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Kennedy The Bill of Rights is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Proposed following the oftentimes bitter 1787–88 battle over ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and crafted to address the objections raised by Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights amendments add certain safeguards of democracy—specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, clear limitations on the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and explicit declarations that all powers not specifically delegated to Congress by the Constitution are reserved for the states or the people—to the Constitution. The concepts codified in these amendments are built upon those found in several earlier documents, including the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the English Bill of Rights 1689, along with earlier documents such as Magna Carta (1215). On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison introduced a series of thirty-nine amendments to the constitution in the House of Representatives. Among his recommendations Madison proposed opening up the Constitution and inserting specific rights limiting the power of Congress in Article One, Section 9. Seven of these limitations would become part of the ten ratified Bill of Rights amendments. Ultimately, on September 25, 1789, Congress approved twelve articles of amendment to the Constitution and submitted them to the states for ratification. Contrary to Madison's original proposal that the articles be incorporated into the main body of the Constitution, they were proposed as supplemental additions (codicils) to it. Articles Three–Twelve were ratified as additions to the Constitution on December 15, 1791, and became Amendments One–Ten of the Constitution. Article Two became part of the Constitution on May 7, 1992, as the Twenty-seventh Amendment.[1] Article One is technically still pending before the states. Originally the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. The door for their application upon state governments was opened in the 1860s, following ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the early 20th century both federal and state courts have used the Fourteenth Amendment to apply portions of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments. The process is known as incorporation. There are several original engrossed copies of the Bill of Rights still in existence. One of these is on permanent public display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights