In simple terms, the 9th Amendment says that the rights written into the Constitution are not the only rights you have. Just because a freedom isn’t listed doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and the government can’t treat an unlisted right as unimportant or nonexistent for that reason alone.
The full text is one sentence: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”1Constitution Annotated. Amendment 9 Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it is the shortest kind of promise the Constitution makes: a promise about what the rest of the document does not say.
What the Key Words Mean
Three words carry most of the weight.
Enumeration means listing things one by one. The first eight amendments enumerate rights: speech, religion, jury trials, protection against unreasonable searches, and so on.
Construed means interpreted. The amendment is giving instructions to courts and government officials about how to read the Constitution.
Disparage means to treat as unimportant or lesser. The government can’t wave off a freedom just because the founders didn’t happen to write it down.
Put those together and the sentence becomes: the fact that the Constitution lists some rights should not be read as denying or belittling the other rights that people keep.
Why the Founders Added It
The Ninth Amendment settled an argument. Federalists worried that writing out a list of specific rights would backfire — if some rights were listed and others weren’t, the federal government might claim authority over anything left off the list. A bill of rights, in other words, could accidentally shrink liberty instead of protecting it.2Constitution Annotated. Historical Background on Ninth Amendment
Anti-Federalists took the opposite view: without a written declaration, the federal government would grow at the expense of individual freedom. James Madison broke the deadlock. When he introduced his proposed amendments in the House, he acknowledged the Federalist concern that listing specific protections “would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration,” and offered what became the Ninth Amendment as the fix.2Constitution Annotated. Historical Background on Ninth Amendment The country would get its Bill of Rights, with a built-in instruction that the list was never meant to be complete.
What the Amendment Does and Doesn’t Do
The Ninth Amendment doesn’t create any specific right. It doesn’t say you have a right to privacy, or to travel, or to marry. It functions as a rule of interpretation — an instruction telling courts and officials how to read the rest of the Constitution.3Cornell Law School. Amendment IX Unenumerated Rights – Ninth Amendment Doctrine
The instruction is simple. Silence in the Constitution is not permission for the government to act. If a freedom isn’t mentioned, that doesn’t mean the government has power over it. As Justice Arthur Goldberg put it in a 1965 opinion, the amendment “shows a belief of the Constitution’s authors that fundamental rights exist that are not expressly enumerated in the first eight amendments and an intent that the list of rights included there not be deemed exhaustive.”3Cornell Law School. Amendment IX Unenumerated Rights – Ninth Amendment Doctrine
The underlying idea is that the government doesn’t grant your rights. You already have them. The Constitution limits what the government can do, not what you can do.
Rights That Aren’t Listed but Are Still Protected
Freedoms that aren’t written into the Constitution but are still treated as protected are called unenumerated rights — “unenumerated” just means “not listed.”4Cornell Law School. Ninth Amendment Over time, courts have recognized several:
- The right to privacy in personal decisions like contraception and intimate relationships, first firmly established in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which struck down a Connecticut law banning contraceptives for married couples.5Cornell Law School. Right to Privacy
- The right to travel freely between states without government permission.
- The right to marry and to make decisions about raising your children.
- The right to vote, which no amendment affirmatively guarantees to every citizen, though several amendments bar specific forms of voting discrimination.
These share a common thread: they are personal decisions most people would expect to make without government interference. The Ninth Amendment doesn’t define any of them in detail. It establishes that the Constitution’s silence about them isn’t a reason to leave them unprotected.
How Courts Decide Which Unlisted Rights Count
Saying unlisted rights exist raises an obvious question: which ones? The Supreme Court answered in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) with a two-part test. First, the right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Second, the court must give a “careful description” of the specific liberty at issue.6Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health Organization Applying that test, the Court held there is no fundamental right to physician-assisted suicide.
In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court took a more flexible approach when it recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, looking at how the understanding of liberty had evolved rather than sticking strictly to historical practice.
Then came Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). The majority overruled Roe v. Wade, applied the Glucksberg test strictly, and held that abortion was not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and therefore was not protected.6Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health Organization The majority distinguished abortion from other recognized unenumerated rights, such as marriage, contraception, and childrearing decisions. Critics warned the same strict historical test could be used to narrow those other protections later. Whatever your view of the outcome, Dobbs shows how much the Ninth Amendment’s promise depends on which framework judges use to identify unlisted rights.
Ninth Amendment vs. Tenth Amendment
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments sit next to each other and are easy to mix up, but they cover different ground. The Ninth is about rights — your personal freedoms are not limited to what’s listed. The Tenth is about powers — any governmental authority not given to the federal government belongs to the states or the people.4Cornell Law School. Ninth Amendment
A shortcut: the Ninth stops the argument that “if a right isn’t listed, it doesn’t exist.” The Tenth stops the argument that “if a power isn’t prohibited, the federal government can claim it.”
Why the Ninth Amendment Rarely Wins Cases on Its Own
For a provision with such a broad promise, the Ninth Amendment does surprisingly little work in court. No Supreme Court decision has ever struck down a law based on the Ninth Amendment alone. When courts protect an unlisted right, they almost always pair the Ninth with another provision, usually the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which applies to state governments.
The amendment’s open-ended language has also drawn criticism. Some judges and scholars argue that because the text doesn’t identify any specific right, it doesn’t give judges the authority to declare what those rights are. Justice Antonin Scalia took this position, writing that the amendment’s refusal to “deny or disparage” other rights is “far removed from affirming any one of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be.” Supporters respond that ignoring the amendment reads it out of the Constitution entirely, and the founders would not have included a provision meant to be meaningless.
That tension is the practical reality behind the Ninth Amendment’s simple sentence. It stands for a real idea — that your rights aren’t limited to a list — but turning that idea into an enforceable protection has always depended on the other tools courts use alongside it.