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This chapter examines the revival of the presumption of constitutionality and its almost immediate qualification in the form of Footnote Four, which it argues is inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment. The era in which the Supreme Court attempted to scrutinize the necessity and propriety of state and federal restrictions on liberty came to a close as the perceived legitimacy of legislative activism continued to grow. The doctrinal vehicle used by the New Deal Court to overturn the Progressive Era precedents was the adoption of a presumption of constitutionality. The chapter first provides an overview of Footnote Four before discussing the Ninth Amendment, which mandates that unenumerated rights be treated the same as those that are listed. It shows that Footnote Four runs afoul of the text of the Constitution, and more specifically the Ninth Amendment.

This chapter continues the discussion of the history of the Ninth Amendment and eventually takes it to the one place where no history of it can be found—the judicial opinions of Chief Justice John Marshall. It is argued that different people used the Ninth Amendment in different ways. Some read the amendment as significantly restricting federal power; others insisted that the amendment placed few if any constraints on federal power. But these are differences of degree, not kind. Every court and commentator who took a position on the Ninth Amendment in the initial decades of the Constitution—whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist or Democratic-Republican, nationalist or states' rightist, drafter or ratifier—all described the Ninth as echoing the same federalist principles as the Tenth. Rather than considering the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment, the chapter focuses on what happened to the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment.

This chapter discusses how the transfigured Ninth Amendment, although used in support of a broad conception of individual freedom, has become a far smaller provision than that envisioned by its framers and has been rendered altogether unenforceable as an independent provision in the Bill of Rights. It describes how the Ninth Amendment has played an important role in matters involving the Supreme Court of the United States.

This chapter discusses the use of the Ninth Amendment in the years preceding the Civil War and the potential impact of the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment. It seeks to reconcile the principles informing the original Constitution with the new more libertarian principles of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

This chapter addresses just how the federalist vision of the Ninth Amendment presented in Chapters 2 and 3 fits with the actual text of the amendment and how the amendment fits alongside the Tenth Amendment. Doing so requires both a deeper and a broader look at the amendment. Deeper, because it requires revisiting some earlier points about the final language of the text; broader, because it expands our vision beyond the Ninth Amendment and considers aspects of the original Tenth Amendment that also may have been forgotten or lost.

This chapter begins by presenting the most commonly told story about the historical Ninth Amendment. It argues that the Ninth Amendment did not emerge unsought out of the unique mind of James Madison. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the origins of the Ninth Amendment are found in concerns raised by the ratifiers in the state conventions. The chapter turns to the drafting of the Ninth Amendment and considers terms that the founding generation likely viewed rather differently from the way we understand them today. It concludes with a discussion of the dual nature of retained rights.

Assuming that an accurate understanding of U.S. constitutional history can assist us in our effort to understand and apply our Constitution today, this chapter addresses the question of whether restoring the lost history of the Ninth Amendment would make any difference to this fundamental task of citizenship. It argues that the Ninth Amendment's future as an enforceable provision in the Bill of Rights depends on our national commitment to maintaining a Madisonian balance between state and national power.

This chapter focuses on the Alien and Sedition Acts. The present chapter and the previous chapter on the Eleventh Amendment illustrate something generally missed—or misrepresented—about republican constitutional theory in the early republic. The so-called compact theory of the Constitution, the idea that the Constitution represents a compact between the states and the national government, is often presented as having emerged out of the proslavery ideology of the 1830s and viewed in opposition to the (entirely) more reasonable theories of Chief Justice John Marshall. This school of constitutional history places the initial seeds of southern secessionist theory in the naive hands of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who embraced the inflammatory language of states' rights and interposition in their Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. According to this view, compact theory is a post hoc political invention that departs from the original understanding of the Constitution and that arose years after the founding as part of a political effort to displace the Federalist Party in the election of 1800.

This chapter examines how a Presumption of Liberty can protect the unenumerable rights retained by the people by shifting the background interpretive presumption of constitutionality whenever legislation restricts the liberties of the people. One approach that judges may take toward legislation restricting the retained liberties of the people is to protect all the rights retained by the people equally whether enumerated or unenumerated. The question that arises is how one would identify the unenumerated rights retained by the people, or how to define the “substantive sphere of liberty” that is protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because ignoring all unenumerated rights violates the mandate of the Ninth Amendment, the chapter considers two alternatives: using originalism to identify specific unenumerated rights and the Presumption of Liberty.

This chapter focuses on the Eleventh Amendment. The amendment represented the first act of popular sovereignty under the new Constitution, and it demanded that federal courts respect the rule of strict construction promised by the Federalists and declared in the Bill of Rights. The history recounted in this chapter provides important independent support for the idea that the founding generation understood “the people” of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to refer to the sovereign people in the states—people who had delegated away important powers with the adoption of the Constitution, but who nevertheless retained their sovereign existence after 1787. This understanding of retained sovereignty included important assumptions about the proper construction of delegated federal power, including the delegated power of federal courts.

This concluding chapter argues that the original meaning of the entire Constitution, as amended, is much more libertarian than the one selectively enforced by the Supreme Court. It cites the evidence of original meaning presented in this book; for example, the “privileges or immunities” of citizens included natural rights as well as rights created by the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The term “commerce” unquestionably meant trade or exchange and did not extend to such other vital economic activities as manufacturing or agriculture. The “judicial power” included the power of to nullify unconstitutional statutes. The Ninth Amendment mandates that unenumerated rights shall not be denied or disparaged. The chapter asserts that attempts to perfect the Constitution by judicial construction conflict with and override its original meaning. It ends by insisting that the opportunity still exists to adopt a Presumption of Liberty and restore the lost Constitution.

This book examines whether the U.S. Constitution—either as written or as actually applied—is legitimate. It argues that the most commonly held view of constitutional legitimacy—the “consent of the governed”—is wrong because it is a standard that no constitution can meet. It shows why holding the Constitution to this unattainable ideal both undermines its legitimacy and allows others to substitute their own meaning for that of the text. The book considers the notion of “natural rights” as “liberty rights,” along with the nature and scope of the so-called police power of states. Furthermore, it analyzes the original meaning of key provisions of the text that have been either distorted or excised entirely from the judges' Constitution and ignored: the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause in the original Constitution, the Ninth Amendment, and the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.