The Bill of Rights

Ten sentences. That’s really what the Bill of Rights is — ten short passages, none longer than a paragraph, added to the Constitution less than three years after it took effect.

They protect the freedoms Americans reach for most often without thinking about where they come from: the right to say what you think, to practice your faith or none at all, to not have soldiers move into your house, to not be searched without reason, to get a lawyer if you’re accused of a crime. This page is the starting point — a short history of why these amendments exist, what each one actually says, and where to go to read any of them in full.

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A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1787

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Why the Constitution needed a Bill of Rights

The original Constitution, signed in 1787, didn’t have one. That was deliberate: its drafters believed a federal government with only specifically listed powers had no need to promise it wouldn’t abuse powers it was never given in the first place.

Not everyone agreed. During the state ratification debates, a group of critics who became known as the Anti-Federalists argued that leaving rights unwritten left them unprotected — that a future Congress, given enough incentive, could read “necessary and proper” to mean whatever it wanted, and the states would have nothing specific to point to in response.

Virginia had already tested the idea a decade earlier. George Mason’s 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights spelled out protections for speech, religion, and due process before the federal Constitution existed, drawing on England’s own 1689 Bill of Rights — a document written in response to a king who had suspended laws, packed juries, and disarmed his opponents. By the time the ratification conventions were underway, several states made clear they would approve the Constitution only on the understanding that amendments protecting individual rights would follow.

James Madison took on the job of writing them, somewhat reluctantly. He had first sided with the Federalists who thought a bill of rights unnecessary, but he changed his position once it was clear that a promise of amendments was the price of ratification in several key states. He introduced his proposals to the First Congress on June 8, 1789; the House and Senate each trimmed the list before agreeing on twelve amendments to send to the states in September 1789.

The Ten Amendments

Each amendment below has its own page — the full original text, what it means in practice, how courts have applied it, and, where a real live debate exists, how people on the left and right tend to see it differently.

Why it still matters

These aren’t retired historical artifacts. Federal courts apply the Bill of Rights constantly, and the questions it raises are rarely settled for good: what counts as an “unreasonable” search changes as technology changes; what “cruel and unusual” means has never been fixed to one list of punishments; how far “the freedom of speech” extends online had no obvious answer in 1791, because the internet didn’t exist.

Almost every Supreme Court term includes at least one Bill of Rights case, and most Americans meet these amendments directly at some point — during a traffic stop, on jury duty, in a workplace dispute over speech, or in an argument about what the government can and can’t do to them.

Understanding what these ten amendments actually say — not the shorthand version, the real text — is one of the most practical pieces of civic knowledge there is. It’s the difference between knowing you have a right and knowing what that right covers, where its edges are, and why people who agree on the text can still disagree sharply about what it means in a specific case.

The full text

The ten amendments as the National Archives transcribes them, with the original spelling and punctuation.

Text: National Archives, “The Bill of Rights: A Transcription,” spelling and punctuation as published there.

Start with the First Amendment →