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35 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 865 (1960)
The Bill of Rights

handle is hein.journals/nylr35 and id is 873 raw text is: THE BILL OF RIGHTS* HUGO L. BLACK AM honored to be the first speaker in your new annual series of James Madison lectures. The title of the series suggested the title of my talk: The Bill of Rights. Madison lived in the stirring times between 1750 and 1836, during which the Colonies declared, fought for, and won their independence from England. They then set up a new national government dedicated to Liberty and Justice. Madison's role in creating that government was such a major one that he has since been generally referred to as the Father of our Constitution. He was a most influential member of the Philadelphia Convention that submitted the Constitution to the people of the states; he alone kept a comprehensive report of the daily proceedings of the Con- vention; he was an active member of the Virginia Convention that adopted the Constitution after a bitter fight; finally, as a member of the First Congress, he offered and sponsored through that body proposals that became the first ten amendments, generally thought of as our Bill of Rights. For these and many other reasons, Madi- son's words are an authentic source to help us understand the Con- stitution and its Bill of Rights. In the course of my discussion I shall have occasion to refer to some of the many things Madison said about the meaning of the Constitution and the first ten amendments. In doing so, I shall refer to statements made by him during the Bill of Rights debates as reported in the Annals of Congress. There has been doubt cast upon the accuracy of the reports of Congressional debates and transactions in the Annals. I am assured by Mr. Irving Brant, the eminent biographer of Madison, that Madison's discussions of the Bill of Rights as reported in the Annals are shown to be cor- rect by Madison's own manuscripts on file in the Library of Congress. What is a bill of rights? In the popular sense it is any document setting forth the liberties of the people. I prefer to think of our Bill of Rights as including all provisions of the original Constitution and Amendments that protect individual liberty by barring government from acting in a particular area or from acting except under certain prescribed procedures. I have in mind such clauses in the body of the Constitution itself as those which safeguard the right of habeas corpus, forbid bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, guarantee trial by jury, and strictly define treason and limit the way it can be tried Hugo L. Black is Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. * This article was delivered as the first James Madison Lecture at the New York University School of Law on February 17, 1960. 1 See also Brant, The Madison Heritage, 35 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 882 (1960). Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review

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