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Constitution was written and signed
In 1787, the Constitution was written, and the nation consisted of fewer than 4 million people living in thirteen agricultural states along the Atlantic Coast. -
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Bill of rights
In 1788 political leaders in Massachusetts and Virginia refused to support ratification of the new Constitution without a bill of rights that would limit the power of the new federal government. In 1791 the states ratified ten amendments that described these rights, which became known as the Bill of Rights. -
When they relized a change was needed
In 1819, the Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, stated his conviction that the Constitution’s flexibility was necessary and something that the Framers intended. -
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Equal rights
In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal facilities for African Americans did not violate the Constitution. Almost 60 years later, the Supreme Court reversed its position in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the Brown case, the Supreme Court said that “separate educational facilities were inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. -
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Ratification method
Almost all of the amendments have been ratified using the state legislature method. The other ratification method—state-ratifying conventions—has been used only once: for the Twenty-first Amendment (1933), which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) banning the sale of alcoholic beverages. -
Religion
In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religion allows Amish families to keep their children home after eighth grade despite a state law that required school attendance to a later age. -
Texas v. Johnson
In 1989, the Supreme Court heard a case about a man who purposely set an American flag on fire as part of a public protest and was arrested and convicted for violating a Texas law that prohibited desecrating the flag. The Supreme Court ruled that flag burning in the context of a political protest is symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment, so the Texas law was unconstitutional. -
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First and second amendments
In 2008 the Supreme Court clarified the Second Amendment, that the amendment protected Americans’ rights to use handguns for legitimate purposes. That said, the Supreme Court pointed out that, like the First Amendment’s right of free speech, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms was not unlimited, and guns could still be reasonably regulated. So in 2010 the Supreme Court extended the Second Amendment’s protections to apply to states as well as the federal government in McDonald v. Chicago.
