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Questions or comments? Please contact the editor, Denise Shanks
This assignment will give you a better understanding of the Ninth Amendment and how the Supreme Court tied it to the right to privacy. First, you will decipher the wording of the actual amendment and then see how it was applied by the Court in the Griswold decision. Finally, you will be asked to be a judge and decide whether this right to privacy should be curtailed or further expanded.
1. In the space below, write the actual text of the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution (found in the appendix of your text).
2. What does that mean (in simple English)?
3. Go to http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/149/ (Griswold v CT) and explain the law in question and whether the Supreme Court ruled it to be constitutional.
4. Read this excerpt from Justice Goldberg’s consenting opinion in the case and discuss what part of the constitution the right to privacy comes from. “Although the Constitution does not speak in so many words of the right of privacy in marriage, I cannot believe that it offers these fundamental rights no protection. The fact that no particular provision of the Constitution explicitly forbids the State from disrupting the traditional relation of the family - a relation as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization -surely does not show that the Government was meant to have the power to do so. Rather, as the Ninth Amendment expressly recognizes, there are fundamental personal rights such as this one, which are protected from abridgment by the Government though not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. …The Ninth Amendment… was proffered to quiet expressed fears that a bill of specifically enumerated rights could not be sufficiently broad to cover all essential rights and that the specific mention of certain rights would be interpreted as a denial that others were protected.” (for the full opinion, go to http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=381 &invol=479)
5. Do you agree with the Court that we should be guaranteed rights not listed in the Constitution?
6. List one controversial issue outside of abortion (see chapter 4’s discussion on the right to privacy) that deals with the right to privacy and discuss whether that right should be protected.
