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Baby Ninth Amendments
How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. That’s why the Founders created the Ninth Amendment, protecting rights that aren’t specifically listed, or enumerated, in the U.S. Constitution. Likewise, most state constitutions contain virtually identical protections called Baby Ninth Amendments.
In Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters, the IJ Center for Judicial Engagement’s own Anthony Sanders tells the story of how state constitutions came to safeguard unenumerated rights and how judges have fallen down on their job of protecting those rights, which include everything from the right to earn an honest living to the right to feed the homeless to the right to keep a garden on one’s private property. Sanders also demonstrates how judges can use Baby Ninth Amendments to rejuvenate unenumerated rights.
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