Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights offers an appropriate occasion to reassess its intellectual heritage. British radicals, I will argue, had a major impact on the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including the rarely cited ninth amendment, so crucial for the resolution of such sociolegal issues as the rights to life and privacy and the place of religion in society. By radicals I mean those who sought fundamental changes in politics, religion, society, or the economy by striking at the root of contemporary assumptions and institutions.
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13. Madison, Papers, 1:118. Some of the colonists attempted to benefit from the 1688–1689 revolution in the mother country. In 1696 the Maryland Assembly tried unsuccessfully to claim all the rights and liberties of England's “fundamental laws,” including Magna Carta, the 1628 Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights.Google ScholarLovejoy, David S., The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972), pp. 369–370.Google ScholarJohn Adams would later remind his readers that Massachusetts, like England, had made “an original express contract” with William III. The Works of John Adams, ed. Adams, Charles F., 10 vols. (Boston, 1850–1856), 4:114.Google Scholar
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20. PRO SP 29/93/8; 29/276/82; 29/277/14, 204, 204.1; 29/281/97; 29/287/63; 29/335/302; 29/362/67; 29/363/53, 71; 29/383/74; 29/386/16; 29/414/54; 29/422/79; 29/436/55, 111, 144; True Protestant Mercury no. 158(8–12 July 1682).
21. In 1765 Philadelphia Presbyterians unwittingly adopted the battlecry of the Vennerites, “No King but King Jesus.”Google ScholarBloch, Ruth H., “Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. Noll, Mark A. (New York, 1990), p. 51.Google Scholar
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35. The demand for free trade reflected the influence of an emerging economic liberalism that eventually became a key force in shaping American thought, especially in the post-revolutionary era. Appleby, Joyce, “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology,” Journal of American History 64 (1978): 935–937,CrossRefGoogle Scholarand her fuller explication in Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984). The demand for a limited veto reflects the long campaign to restrict and then abolish royal power in the making of laws.Google Scholar See Weston, Corrine C., “Co-ordination—a Radicalising Principle in Stuart Politics,” The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Jacob, Margaret and Jacob, James (London, 1984), pp. 85–104.Google Scholar
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55. Concurring with the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote: “The concept of liberty protects those personal rights that are fundamental, and is not confined to the specific terms of the Bill of Rights.… [Judges] must look to the ‘traditions and conscience of our people’ to determine whether a principle is ‘so rooted [there as] to be ranked as fundamental.’”Google Scholar