The Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in full: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”1Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Ninth Amendment Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, this single sentence establishes that the freedoms listed elsewhere in the Constitution are not the only freedoms Americans possess.
That is the whole text. One sentence, twenty-one words, no subsections. What follows explains what each part of it means, why the framers wrote it that way, and how courts have read it in the two centuries since.
What Each Part of the Sentence Means
The amendment’s power lies in four phrases, each doing specific work.
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights” — Enumeration means the act of listing things one by one. Here it points to the specific freedoms spelled out in the first eight amendments: free speech, the right to bear arms, protection against unreasonable searches, the right to a jury trial, and the rest. “Certain rights” signals that the list is partial by design.
“Shall not be construed” — Construed means interpreted by a court or other legal authority. The amendment is a direct instruction to anyone reading the Constitution, telling them what conclusion they may not draw from the text.
“To deny or disparage” — This is the operative phrase. To deny an unlisted right is to treat it as though it does not exist. To disparage one is to treat it as though it carries less weight than a listed right. The amendment forbids both moves.
“Others retained by the people” — “Retained” means kept, held onto, never surrendered. The word signals that these rights already belong to individuals and always have. The government did not create them, so the government cannot erase them by leaving them off a list.
Read together, the sentence says: the fact that a right is not written into the Constitution is not evidence that the right does not exist or is less important. The Bill of Rights is a floor, not a ceiling.
Why the Framers Wrote It This Way
The unusual phrasing exists because the Bill of Rights itself was controversial. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 84 that listing specific protections was risky. His concern: if the Constitution named certain freedoms the government could not touch, future officials might conclude that the government could regulate anything not on the list. Spelling out that the press is free could imply that the government held some original power over the press in the first place.2National Endowment for the Humanities. Building the Bill of Rights
James Madison shared that worry but recognized that the public wanted written guarantees. Addressing the House on June 8, 1789, he called Hamilton’s concern “one of the most plausible arguments” against a bill of rights: that listing specific exceptions to government power “would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration.” His solution was a new clause providing that the listed exceptions “shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people.” Refined during ratification, that language became the Ninth Amendment.
The word choices in the final text track Madison’s purpose exactly. “Construed” targets legal interpreters. “Deny or disparage” covers both the strong misreading (the right does not exist) and the weak one (the right matters less). “Retained by the people” invokes the natural-rights tradition the framers took from John Locke, in which people hold inherent rights and only surrender specific powers to government, keeping everything else.
What Counts as a Right “Retained by the People”
The amendment names no specific rights, and that silence is deliberate. Over time, courts have identified freedoms that fit its description: freedoms Americans hold even though the Constitution never lists them. Legal scholars call these unenumerated rights.
- Privacy. The word does not appear anywhere in the Constitution, yet the Supreme Court has treated personal privacy as a protected liberty for over a century.
- Parental authority over children. The Court held as early as 1923 that parents have a fundamental liberty interest in directing their children’s upbringing and education, striking down a law that restricted foreign-language instruction. In 1925 it invalidated a compulsory public-school law, declaring that “the child is not the mere creature of the State.”3Justia. Troxel v. Granville
- Interstate travel. No clause expressly grants the freedom to move between states, but the Court has long treated it as a necessary feature of the union.
- The right to vote. Several amendments prohibit discrimination in voting (the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth), but no provision affirmatively declares that every citizen has a right to vote.
Each of these illustrates the amendment’s core claim: absence from the text does not mean absence from the law.
How Courts Have Used the Text
The Ninth Amendment has never served as the sole basis for a Supreme Court ruling. Its most influential appearance came in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which struck down a state law criminalizing the use of contraceptives by married couples. The majority found a right to marital privacy in what it called “penumbras” of several amendments.4Justia. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479
Justice Arthur Goldberg’s concurrence gave the amendment its most thorough judicial treatment. Allowing the government to violate a right “so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage” just because the first eight amendments do not mention it, he wrote, “is to ignore the Ninth Amendment, and to give it no effect whatsoever.” The amendment, he explained, “shows the intent of the Constitution’s authors that other fundamental personal rights should not be denied such protection or disparaged in any other way simply because they are not specifically listed in the first eight constitutional amendments.”
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has described the amendment’s actual function this way: it “is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution.” When courts protect an unenumerated right, they usually anchor the decision in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty,” citing the Ninth Amendment as supporting evidence rather than as the operative provision.
The scope of what the amendment protects remains contested. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, holding that “no such right [to abortion] is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”5Constitution Center. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization The same framework that recognized marital privacy in Griswold was found insufficient to protect reproductive autonomy in Dobbs. The text of the Ninth Amendment does not resolve which rights qualify; it only ensures the question keeps being asked.
How the Ninth Amendment Differs From the Tenth
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are often confused because both address what the Constitution does not say. They protect different things.
The Tenth Amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”6Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Tenth Amendment
The Ninth Amendment is about rights: the people hold more freedoms than the Constitution lists. The Tenth Amendment is about powers: the federal government holds only the powers the Constitution grants it, with everything else belonging to the states or the people. One guards the breadth of personal liberty. The other guards the limits of government reach.
What the Text Actually Does
At its core, the Ninth Amendment is a rule of interpretation written into the Constitution itself. It tells anyone reading the document not to treat the Bill of Rights as a complete catalog of freedom. When a court evaluates whether the government has overstepped, the amendment blocks the argument that “this right is not in the text, therefore the government can regulate it freely.” That specific inference is exactly what Madison designed the sentence to prevent.
The amendment also shifts the underlying presumption in constitutional disputes. The individual does not have to find a specific word in the Constitution to prove they are free; the government has to find a specific grant of power to prove it can act. Every right recognized beyond the first eight amendments owes something to that principle. The list was always meant to be a floor, never a ceiling.