The Complete Bill of Rights: The Drafts, Debates, Sources, and Origins

The fundamental, inalienable rights and privileges set forth in the Bill of Rights represent the very foundations of American liberty. The Complete Bill of Rights is a documentary record of the process by which these rights and privileges were defined and recorded as law.

Now in its second edition, The Complete Bill of Rights contains double the content featured in the first edition. This new edition includes all the background texts for the origins and debate of the ratification of the Bill of Rights and presents them clause by clause in a complete, accurate, and accessible format. Arranged in chronological order, the work presents each clause in its finished form, and traces its development from its proposal through drafting through adoption. Cogan presents every draft of the text and every documentary source, including state convention proposals, state, colonial, and English constitutional texts, sources in caselaw and treatises, and State and Colonial statutory and decisional law. He includes data from diaries and correspondence, pamphlets and newspapers, as well as the Congressional and State debates, including the correspondence of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams among many others who debated the issues that the Supreme Court considers law today. The book also contains each version of the drafts from the manuscript collections of the National Archives and Library of Congress. The result is the most detailed and useful record of the debate over the Bill of Rights available.

This first new edition since 1997 substantially expands on the previous edition, providing the same invaluable texts for two fundamental protections of liberty found in the Constitution of 1789 (though not in the Bill of Rights): the protections under habeas corpus and the privileges and immunities clauses. Each chapter expands the background discussion of rights, and provides pertinent texts in contemporary legal dictionaries to meet the increasing interest of federal and state courts in additional sources for interpretation. The second edition also provides a chapter-by-chapter discussion of rights by treatise and abridgement writers in addition to Blackstone. Finally, all margin notes and footnotes in the dictionaries and treatises are included, so the reader has access to the totality of the original statues and case law upon which the drafters relied.

The Complete Bill of Rights is the only comprehensive collection of texts essential to understanding the Bill of Rights. Organized in an accessible and practical manner, it is an invaluable tool for law students, judges, lawyers, and law clerks, as well as scholars of the law, history, and political science.

Reviews from previous edition:

"Every reference library should have a copy."--

"All academic research libraries should buy this book."--

"For anyone interested in our Constitution, our history, or our political theory, this book is an intellectual treasure chest. It is more than legislative history. It is constitution-drafting in the raw--all the proposals and all the give-and-take (some of it disturbing) that resulted in the adoption of the Bill of Rights."--Floyd A. Abrams,

"This wonderful collection offers one-stop shopping for the serious student of the Bill of Rights, for the casual reader, and for everyone in between."--Akhil Reed Amar, Southmayd Professor of Law, Yale Law School

"This book is an invaluable resource for constitutional scholars, teachers, litigators, and judges alike. It collects and collates the basic texts necessary for informed interpretation of the Bill of Rights and gives them to researchers in a compact, comprehensive, and reliable form that is wonderfully organized for both quick scanning and sustained critical analysis. It makes previously difficult research tasks easy and opens new lines of thinking at a glance."-- Anthony G. Amsterdam, Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor and Director, Lawyering Program, New York University Law School

"What a treasure. In one volume, everything any constitutional scholar, lawyer, or history buff needs to know about the origins of our Bill of Rights. Now the debate about how these amendments should be interpreted can really begin."--Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor, Harvard Law School

"The Complete Bill of Rights is a major occasion in American publishing. This volume will take its place on the reference shelf next to Farrand, Elliott, Storing, Kurland, and Lerner as essential to the understanding of the American constitutional tradition. Never before has it been possible to think seriously and completely about the text of the Bill of Rights, for never before have all of the texts relating to the final version of the Bill of Rights been easily and accurately accessible in one reference work. This is a triumph of careful and thoughtful scholarship. It is now one of the essential components of the library of constitutionalism. It will never be out of date."--Stanley N. Katz, President, American Council of Learned Societies

" . . . all students of the Constitution will find this a helpful and provocative work."--Pergamon

" . . .The Complete Bill of Rights contribute[s] significantly to our undersranding of a towering constitutional document that plays a major role in determining our national identity . . . "--Wisconsin Magazine of History

"...The Complete Bill of Rights is, by any reasonable standard of measurement, a magnificent accomplishment . . .[it] is likely to become the standard source book for those seeking to ground their examination of the issues posed by the first ten amendments in the original source materials describing their drafting, discussion and ratification."--Michigan Law Review

Neil H. Cogan is Professor of Law at Whittier Law School. He was Dean of Whittier Law School and Vice President for Legal Education for the College from 2001 to 2009. During his deanship, the Law School established the Center for International and Comparative Law, the Institute for Legal Writing and Professional Skills, the Institute for Student and Graduate Academic Support, the Institute for Trial Advocacy, and six Summer Study Abroad Programs. He is a litigator, having tried both bench and jury trials and argued appeals in the federal and state courts. His The Complete Bill of Rights (Oxford University Press, 1997) has been frequently cited by the United States Supreme Court and in the scholarly literature.

Abbreviations of Sources

Preface

Chapter 1: Amendment I - Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses

Chapter 2: Amendment I - Free Speech and Free Press Clauses

Chapter 3: Amendment I - Assembly and Petition Clauses

Chapter 4: Amendment II - Keep and Bear Arms Clause

Chapter 5: Amendment III - Quartering Soldiers Clause

Chapter 6: Amendment IV - Search and Seizure Clause

Chapter 7: Amendment V - Grand Jury Clause

Chapter 8: Amendment V - Double Jeopardy Clause

Chapter 9: Amendment V - Self-Incrimination Clause

Chapter 10: Amendment V - Due Process Clause

Chapter 11: Amendment V - Takings Clause

Chapter 12: Amendment VI - Criminal Trial Clauses

Chapter 13: Amendment VII - Civil Jury Trial Clauses

Chapter 14: Amendment VIII - Bail/Punishment Clauses

Chapter 15: Amendment IX - Unenumerated Rights Clause

Chapter 16: Amendment X - Reservation of Powers Clause

Chapter 17: Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 - Habeas Corpus Clause

Chapter 18: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1 - Privileges and Immunities Clause

Appendix: Bill of Rights