Does the United States Need a Bill of Rights?

Abstract

American Revolutionaries pointed to the English Bill of Rights of 1689 to support arguments against the Crown and made bills of rights into one of the most potent political genres of the age. But while the U.S. Constitution was being debated and ratified in 1787 and 1788, prominent framers argued that a federal bill of rights was unnecessary and even dangerous, a throwback to English monarchy completely out of place in a republic and one that threatened to augment governmental power rather than limit it. In 1789, one of those skeptical framers, James Madison, helped draft a series of amendments that became known, only many decades later, as the “Bill of Rights.” This chapter revisits this important debate, exploring the persistence of the genre of bills of rights in light of new historical, political, cultural, and legal studies that posit a persistence of monarchism in the age of the American Revolution.