"for executing it's inspection Laws". A grammar mistake in the Constitution? Daffyd, did you type this in by hand?
Update: Wow! The mistake is in the original document. Do we go after the intentions of the original signers, or are we bound by the exact wording? What would that force these states to do?:)

"No State shall...emit Bills of Credit;" Huh? California?

Interesting that there is a section describing what states may not do. I wonder if that should imply that things like the Bill of Rights aren't intended to restrict the states - since it should have said so explicitly, as it does here.

MikeR, yes, the Bill or Rights was NOT intended to affect the states; most of the individual amendments specifically restricted Congress itself. The 14th amendment "incorporated" some of the bill of rights against the states, but it's still debated which ones.

Note in particular that, given that some of the states ratified the Bill of Rights while having an established state religion, the Establishment Clause meant to them that Congress could not make laws prohibiting THEIR establishment. (BTW, at the time the phrase "establishment of religion" didn't mean "any religion"; it meant "an official state religion".

I think all the states now prohibit establishment in their own Constitutions, and of course the first amendment had to be incorporated against the states anyhow.

MikeR, Wtanksleyjr:

Yes, the 13th (1865), 14th (1868), and 15th (1870)Amendments -- primarily the 14th -- transformed the United States more profoundly than any other event before or since (at least so far; it remains to be seen what B.O. can do). Remember what came right before: The Civil War made it clear that failure (of the Union) was always an option.

Lincoln's great goal was to preserve the Union; and after his death, Congress enacted those "Civil Rights Amendments" in order to prevent the most burning issue of the preceding fourscore years, chattel slavery, from ever again tearing the nation apart. They did this in two ways:

• First, by utterly abolishing not only the slave trade, which had been done in the Constitution itself, but slavery itself, in all states everywhere in the United States.
• Second, by dramatically strengthening the national government at the expense of the formerly "sovereign" states.

Note that the first requires the second, as previously states could themselves choose "slave or free," and nothing in the Constitution gave the feds the authority to say otherwise.

Those amendments inaugurated the "era of incorporation," though it was a long time coming; in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) -- reaffirmed in Presser v. Illinois (1886) -- the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment applied only negatively to actions committed by a state government, and did not require any state to enjoin individual state citizens from depriving other citizens of that same state of their rights. (The cases specifically referred to the 1st Amendment right of assembly and the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms.)

The 14th Amendment reads, in part:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Cruikshank arose from an incident in 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana: A group of primarily black Republicans had surrounded the Colfax courthouse to prevent the Democrats from seizing control of it, following a disputed state election. The "Fusionists" (Democrats) sent a private Ku Klux Klan army to the scene, killing, dispersing, and capturing the black Republicans.

Three years earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed the Enforcement Act of 1870, followed by two others in 1871, which explicitly required every state positively to protect the life, liberty, and property of every citizen, using the 14th Amendment as authority.

The instigators of the Colfax Massacre were indicted and convicted under those acts; but the Court quashed the indictments, holding the Enforcement Act to be unconstitutional: "The fourteenth amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another."

The Court held that that the 14th only prohibited the states themselves from depriving their citizens of their rights; the states could still constitutionally turn a blind eye to private individuals doing the depriving, such as the Fusionists and the Klan.

Many former slave states (and even some traditionally free states) gleefully took advantage of that ruling, sitting back and allowing "independent" private groups to do the dirty work that the Civil Rights Amendments prohibited the states from doing directly. The states also passed disenfranshising laws designed to prevent blacks (and poor whites) from voting, from serving on juries, and by and large nullifying those three amendments.

So at that time, the Civil Rights Amendments were accepted to have incorporated core rights against the states, but only to the extent that they prohibited the states themselves from violating their citizens' rights. The flip side of incorporation had to wait until the tail end of the 19th century, when the rest of the incorporation period began.

It's still ongoing; the most recent example was McDonald v. Chicago, decided last year (!), which fully incorporates the 2nd Amendment to the states (which are now required affirmatively to protect each citizen's right to keep and bear arms from both state and private infringement).

But even today, some elements of the Bill of Rights have never been incorporated to the states. Wikipedia has a handy list of which parts of what amendments in the BoR have been incorporated, and when.

Dafydd the Non-Lawyer (who could, therefore, be totally misinformed)

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