Originally published January 6 2006
Ninth amendment protects what were formerly called natural rights
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Professor Tibor Machan writes about the 9th amendment for Free Market News, criticizing views of current justices on the Supreme Court and explaining the validity of the 9th amendment to the lives of everyday citizens.
Before the US Constitution there was the Federalist Papers and before that the Declaration of Independence and before that John Locke's political works and those of some others.
The lineage involved most fundamentally a theory of basic human rights---natural rights, as Locke had called them, meaning they exists as a feature of our very humanity and membership in a human community.
There was debate as to whether any of these rights should even be listed in a constitution lest people in the future would think that only the listed ones exist.
So as to disabuse people of this notion, the Ninth Amendment was crafted saying that unenumerated---that is, unmentioned---rights exist, let's not forget it.
Quite oddly, such stalwart originalist jurisprudential thinkers as Antonin Scalia and, previously, rejected nominee Robert Bork, have expressed strong disdain toward the Ninth.
When I ask my friends with jurisprudential expertise how this can be, they answer that folks like Scalia and Bork worry that if the Ninth Amendment is taken seriously, it will open the door to justices creating rights out of thin air.
They often think this about those justices who have claimed to find the right to privacy in the US Constitution by way of the Ninth (as in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that invalidated the state's ban on selling contraceptives).
When, as reported, Scalia and Bork have concerns about the Ninth Amendment's opening the door to the invention of rights by justices, this shows that Scalia and Bork do not take the founders' and framers' words seriously.
Even with the current muddled understanding of individual rights---usually dubbed "human" rights, suggesting that they may have nothing to do with individualism as Locke and the Founders thought---it is widely taken that the rights do indeed exist.
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