This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, December 15th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

Today is Bill of Rights Day, a day to mark those rights enumerated

and those unenumerated in the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Tim Lynch is director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice. Well, a lot of people think that the Constitution was unanimously agreed to and people who study history know that the Constitution when it was originally proposed was a controversial document, whether we should move away from the Articles of

Confederation towards a new government.

And so it was hotly contested.

There was the ratifying conventions where big disputes, you had a lot of people like Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee,

people who were the American Revolutionaries opposing the ratification of the Constitution.

So it was hotly contested, and one of the points or criticisms made against the original Constitution

was that it contained no Bill of Rights.

So when they were arguing and debating over the ratification of the Constitution,

a lot of the anti-federalists insisted upon a Bill of Rights.

So what happened was the Constitution was ratified,

but then one of the first things that the new Congress had to do was to amend the Constitution to include a Bill of Rights because this is like one of the conditions that a lot of the

states insisted upon. They were going to ratify the Constitution on the

condition that a bill of rights be amended or added to the Constitution.

So we actually got the Bill of Rights two years

after the original Constitution went into effect.

And that's why we're marking that day this weekend.

December 15th is when the 10 amendments to the Constitution were ratified and became operative.

Where does a Bill of Rights stand today in terms of a recognition by the public, a recognition

by members of government in what those rights signify?

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