the bill of rights was gradually applied to the states through a process called incorporation.
the bill of rights was gradually applied to the states through a process called?
incorporation
the bill of rights had little judicial impact for the first 150 years of its existence; in the words of gordon s. wood, "after ratification, most americans promptly forgot about the first ten amendments to the constitution." the court made no important decisions protecting free speech rights, for example, until 1931. historian richard labunski attributes the bill's long legal dormancy to three factors: first, it took time for a "culture of tolerance" to develop that would support the bill's provisions with judicial and popular will; second, the supreme court spent much of the 19th century focused on issues relating to intergovernmental balances of power; and third, the bill initially only applied to the federal government, a restriction affirmed by "barron v. baltimore" (1833). in the twentieth century, however, most of the bill's provisions were applied to the states via the fourteenth amendment—a process known as incorporation—beginning with the freedom of speech clause, in "gitlow v. new york" (1925). in "talton v. mayes" (1896), the court ruled that constitutional protections, including the provisions of the bill of rights, do not apply to the actions of american indian tribal governments. through the incorporation process the united states supreme court succeeded in extending to the states almost all of the protections in the bill of rights, as well as other, unenumerated rights. the bill of rights thus imposes legal limits on the powers of governments and acts as an anti-majoritarian/minoritarian safeguard by providing deeply entrenched legal protection for various civil liberties and fundamental rights. the supreme court for example concluded in the "west virginia state board of education v. barnette" (1943) case that the founders intended the bill of rights to put some rights out of reach from majorities, ensuring that some liberties would endure beyond political majorities. as the court noted, the idea of the bill of rights "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts." this is why "fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
united states bill of rights
interest in the doctrines of byzantine lawyers came when—around the year 1070—a copy of the "digest" of emperor justinian i found its way into northern italy. scholars in the emerging university of bologna, who previously had access to only a limited portion of the justinianic code, sparked an intellectual rediscovery of roman law through the teaching of law based on byzantine law texts. courts gradually applied byzantine law—as taught in bologna (and soon elsewhere)—first as law "in subsidium" to be applied when there was no local statute or custom in point, and later because judicial officers (judges, magistrates, assessors) felt that its refined legal concepts were more apt to solve complex cases than the customary laws of western and central europe. this process, referred to as reception, took place in the holy roman empire and the mediterranean in the 13th-14th centuries, but was much slower to come to northern europe (e.g., saxony, northern france, the low countries, scandinavia).
roman-dutch law