- Volume 60, Issue 4
- Page 937
Article
Kurt Lash’s Majoritarian Difficulty
A Response to A Textual-Historical Theory of the Ninth Amendment
Randy E. Barnett
Kurt Lash believes that, in addition to individual natural rights, the Ninth Amendment protects collective or majoritarian rights as well. In this essay I explain why his majoritarian vision is contrary to the antimajoritarianism of the man who devised the Ninth Amendment, James Madison, and those who wrote the Constitution. Not coincidentally, it is contrary to the individualism of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, and to the public meaning of the Ninth Amendment as it was received during its ratification. It is also contrary to the individualist conception of popular sovereignty adopted in the text of the Constitution as interpreted by a four-to-one majority of the Supreme Court in its first major constitutional decision. And it is contrary to the individualist interpretation of the Ninth Amendment by the one source he cites who actually uses the word “collective”: St. George Tucker. In sum, the collectivist interpretation of the phrase “others retained by the people” is anachronistic--a projection of contemporary majoritarianism onto a text that is and was most naturally read as referring to the natural rights retained by all individuals, and to these rights alone.