The Bill of Rights: an introduction | US government and civics | Khan Academy

The Bill of Rights, as we know it today, were the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. These amendments guaranteed individual liberty to make sure that citizens had a stated expectation for what the government could or could not do to them. You can kind of see here, in many of these rights, the legacy of the Revolutionary War and the kinds of government abuses that citizens in the colonies had feared.

I'm going to go over these very quickly. We'll spend a lot more time in other videos talking more about these amendments, but I want to give you an overall sense of what they're driving at. Now, the first four amendments guarantee individual liberties. These are freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, freedom to ask the government for redress of grievances, or to deal with a problem that the government may have caused in your life, the right to bear arms, and assemble militias.

State and local militias had made the Revolutionary War a success for the United States. There’s also a ban on quartering soldiers in homes. Recall that the Quartering Act, when the British government said that the colonies had to put up soldiers in their homes, was a major driver of revolution. Additionally, there is a ban on unreasonable search and seizure; that is, it would be necessary for the government to get a warrant to enter your home or to search your belongings.

The next four amendments in the Bill of Rights deal with protections for people accused of crimes. Again, you see the legacy of the Revolutionary War in the idea that the crown had had too much power to persecute individuals. This includes things like the right to due process; that is, to make sure that all the steps of following the law are taken, a ban on being tried twice for the same crime, rights to a speedy and public trial, a jury of your peers, to even have a jury in cases that don't have to do with violent crimes but rather civil disputes, and a ban on excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.

Basically, this is a guarantee that the government will respect the rights of individuals. Now, one of the arguments made against including a Bill of Rights in the Constitution was that listing out those rights might then mean that they were the only rights. By listing out these rights in particular, they might be forfeiting their liberties in other ways.

So, the ninth and tenth amendments attempt to deal with that worry. They say in the ninth amendment any right that isn't listed here is still retained by the people. So, this is not an exhaustive list; this is not the complete list of all the rights retained by the people. The tenth amendment is slightly different but kind of on the same line. They say that if this Constitution has not delegated a right directly to the federal government, then that right is reserved to the states or the people.

So, the federal government can only do the things that are listed in this Constitution. It is a limited government, limited by this document. On the other hand, the rights of the people are unlimited. So, if the Constitution doesn't say that the federal government can do it, that's then a right of the states or the people.