Reflections on the First Amendment

Reflections on the First Amendment Paper

Kashima Riley

HIS/301

Whitney Bell

December 12, 2011

In this paper I will discuss two significant cases related to three of the provisions of the First Amendment. I will evaluate the rights and responsibilities that the Constitution gives American citizens. I will answer the question to what extent does the Constitution protect the right of privacy. I will also discuss why each of the two cases needed to be heard and interpreted by the Supreme Court. I will take a look at how the Supreme Court’s decision in each case continues to affect the rights of American citizens today.

The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments. Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in many other international and regional treaties. Privacy underpins human dignity and other key values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. It has become one of...