One of the main arguments against the Bill of Rights back in 1787-88 was that enumerating specific rights would lead future generations to conclude those were the only ones that existed
Supporters pointed to the 9th Amendment as the fix
And we still somehow ended up where opponents said we'd be 🤦♂️
This is one of my big pet peeves of American jurisprudence. Take the 9th Amendment seriously!
We do not, for example, have a 1st Amendment right to privacy, we have a 9th Amendment right to privacy.
It’s clear from the text that the Ninth Amendment is the original “maybe we didn’t think of everything”. But today’s environment, dominated as it is by Biblical literalists and other weak thinkers, has landed on textualism and originalism as its lodestar.
JP Reid, decidedly no lefty, described the English formation of rights as a process in which government would commit an outrage, after which the people would find that the act infringed upon an unenumerated right that they had all along, it just had to be discovered by the process of being outraged.
Feb 4, 2026 14:15
