Thursday will mark 225 years to the day.
On December 15, 1791, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. That meant that three-fourths of state legislatures had approved them, which meant the Bill of Rights was born.
To commemorate the occasion, here’s a great essay about one of its architects, James Madison. It talks about how Madison opposed a bill of rights at first because he feared that it would limit people’s essential rights to just those listed. He thought a list wasn’t necessary in a new system in which the people were sovereign and the government derived its power from their consent. He also believed that the real buffer against a tyranny of the majority lay in the Constitution’s structural checks and balances: federalism, bicameralism, and the separation of powers. Eventually, though, Madison came around, and at the first Congress of the United States, he introduced the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
The ten amendments enshrine many of our most important rights and freedoms. They declare that, in America, you’re meant to be free in the following ways, among others.
For the full text of the U.S. Bill of Rights, see here.