Ninth Amendment

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Ninth Amendment, amendment (1791) to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, formally stating that the people retain rights absent specific enumeration.

The full text of the Ninth Amendment is:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Prior to, during, and after ratification of the Constitution, debate raged about the protection of individual rights. Eventually, a Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution at the urging of the Anti-Federalists, who feared that without one, too much power would be vested in the federal government. Federalists, who believed that the Constitution had created a limited central government, countered that an enumeration of protected rights would be a possible detriment to individual liberties and render other liberties presumably unworthy of constitutional protection. Thus was born the Ninth Amendment, whose purpose was to assert the principle that the enumerated rights are not exhaustive and final and that the listing of certain rights does not deny or disparage the existence of other rights. What rights were protected by the amendment was left unclear.

Since the enactment of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has never relied solely (or primarily) on the Ninth Amendment, and through the mid-1960s it was mentioned only sparingly. Indeed, in 1955 in a lecture (later turned into book form) titled “The Supreme Court in the American System of Government,” Justice Robert H. Jackson admitted that the Ninth Amendment was a “mystery” to him. Since that time, however, the Ninth Amendment has been used as a secondary source of liberties and has emerged as important in the extension of the rights of privacy.

In Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court held that married couples had the right to use birth control. The majority decision rested on Fourth and Fifth Amendment grounds, but Justice Arthur Goldberg based his concurring opinion squarely on Ninth Amendment principles, stating that

the language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments.