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Initially, the legislatures of each state elected their U.S. senators. In a number of instances, disagreements between the two houses of a state legislature left Senate seats vacant for protracted periods.

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In Article I, sections 2 and 9 the U.S. Constitution said that no direct taxes could be imposed unless made in proportion to the population, as measured by the census. This meant that rather than taxing individuals directly, Congress had to levy taxes in each state based on the state’s population.

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The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the use of race in determining who can vote. The last of the three Reconstruction Era amendments, ratified shortly after the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment sought to advance the civil rights and liberties of the freed slaves and other African Americans.

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The right of privacy—the right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once defined it—is fundamental to our understanding of freedom, but nowhere does the Constitution mention it. When Congress submitted the Bill of Rights to the people for ratification in 1789, privacy was not listed as a liberty that required protection from government.

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In February 2006, an inmate in California was minutes away from execution when two doctors assigned to monitor his death suddenly refused to participate. They protested the use of a three-drug cocktail designed to put the condemned man to sleep before he received the heart-stopping dose.

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The legal separation between children and adults was still hazy at the time of American independence, especially in criminal law. One central issue concerned the age when children formed consciences sufficient to hold them responsible for their actions.

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Television courtroom dramas have made the assistance of counsel during criminal proceedings one of the most recognizable of all rights guaranteed by the Constitution. We witness countless scenes of defendants refusing to cooperate without the presence of an attorney and of defense lawyers jousting in court with prosecutors to win an acquittal for their client.

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Among all abuses of governmental power, we may fear the secret trial most. Trial by jury guards against this practice, and for this reason juries have long occupied an important place in our understanding of individual rights.

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The privilege against self-incrimination goes back to the fourth century, but its most dramatic early expression can be found in medieval controversies between the English king and the church. Royal courts used a system of justice that employed public accusations and jury trials.

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Although it was created primarily to deal with the civil rights issues that followed the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment has affected a broad range of American life, from business regulation to civil liberties to the rights of criminal defendants.

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In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation based on his war powers. It freed the slaves held within the Southern states that were in rebellion against the United States.

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No rule of criminal procedure is older than the one forbidding the government to try defendants twice for the same offense. It was considered so fundamental to due process that its appearance in the Bill of Rights is not surprising.

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As the Electoral College was originally constituted, the candidate who received the most electoral votes became President and the runner-up became Vice President. With the rise of a two-party system, this meant that the President and Vice President might be chosen from different parties.

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The refusal to grant habeas corpus was a grievance during the decades before independence, so the revolutionary generation wrote guarantees of the right into both state and federal constitutions.

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In the Magna Carta (1215), the great charter of English liberty, noblemen forced King John to abide by the “law of the land” in his dealings with them. Under this agreement, the king accepted the idea that his power was not absolute.

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After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1793 that two South Carolina men could sue and collect debts from the state of Georgia, states’-rights advocates in Congress proposed what became the Eleventh Amendment. This amendment specifically prohibits federal courts from hearing cases in which a state is sued by individuals from another state or country.

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The Ninth Amendment offers a constitutional safety net, intended to make it clear that Americans have other fundamental rights beyond those listed in the Bill of Rights.

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The image is an old one in Western history: accuser versus accused, each summoning witnesses publicly in front of a judge to present their different versions of the truth. If the contest is equal and the judge impartial, then we deem the outcome fair and the verdict just, one that speaks the truth.

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We cannot imagine a modern democracy without adult citizens having the right to vote freely. It is a basic right of citizenship in a democratic society. Yet nowhere in the Constitution is the right to vote granted explicitly.

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Slavery is the ultimate form of discrimination, and racial slavery had been part of the American landscape since the mid-seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolution, holding human beings as property was allowed in all thirteen states.

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Many legal observers consider the right to petition to be uninteresting. It has spurred no landmark cases, and the First Amendment’s language is plain and straightforward: Congress shall make no law abridging the “right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It guarantees citizens the right to complain and ask officials to correct a problem or right a wrong, but where is the controversy in exercising this right? It is an obvious right in a democratic society.

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The Sixth Amendment further specifies the protections offered to people accused of committing crimes. It allows the accused to have their cases heard by an impartial jury made up of people from the surrounding community who have no connection to the case.

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Rooted in English common law, the Fifth Amendment seeks to provide fair methods for trying people accused of committing a crime. To avoid giving government unchecked powers, grand jurors are selected from the general population, and their work, conducted in secret, is not hampered by rigid rules about the type of evidence that can be heard.