Justice Black Argues for Total Incorporation of the Bill of Rights
The case of Adamson v. California, decided by the Supreme Court on this day, involved defendant Admiral Dewey Adamson’s Fifth Amendment rights in a state criminal trial. It is most remembered for Justice Hugo Black’s dissent regarding the incorporation of the entire Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment, which would make its protections applicable to the states.
The Supreme Court had started the process of selective incorporation in Gitlow v. New York, decided on June 8, 1925, in which the Court incorporated the Free Speech and Free Press clauses into the Fourteenth Amendment. In his dissent in Adamson, Black vigorously argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should incorporate all of the first eight amendments.
The Supreme Court has never accepted Black’s argument, and has continued the process of selective incorporation. Had the Court accepted Black’s argument in 1947, the history of civil liberties would have been very different — and better for the rights of Americans.
Justice Black: “My study of the historical events that culminated in the Fourteenth Amendment, and the expressions of those who sponsored and favored, as well as those who opposed, its submission and passage persuades me that one of the chief objects that the provisions of the Amendment’s first section, separately and as a whole, were intended to accomplish was to make the Bill of Rights, applicable to the states.”
Read: Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (2000)
Learn more: Michael Perry, We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court (1999)
Learn more about Hugo Black’s life and career: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1848