Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf
Page Number: 44

Cite as:  602 U. S. ____ (2024) 

9 

KAVANAUGH, J., concurring 

Constitution”).

This Court has recognized, for example, that no “purpose
in  ratifying  the  Bill  of  Rights  was  clearer  than  that  of 
securing for the people of the United States much greater 
freedom of religion, expression, assembly, and petition than 
the  people  of  Great  Britain  had  ever  enjoyed.”    Bridges 
v. California, 314 U. S. 252, 265 (1941).  Ratified as it was 
“while the memory of many oppressive English restrictions 
on  the  enumerated  liberties  was  still  fresh,”  the  Bill  of 
Rights “cannot reasonably be taken as approving prevalent 
English  practices.” 
Ibid.;  see,  e.g.,  Hosanna-Tabor 
Evangelical  Lutheran  Church  and  School  v.  EEOC,  565 
U. S.  171,  183  (2012)  (“Familiar  with  life  under  the
established  Church  of  England,  the  founding  generation
sought  to  foreclose  the  possibility  of  a  national  church” 
through  the  First  Amendment’s  Establishment  Clause); 
Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45, 60 (1932) (right to counsel
under  the  Sixth  Amendment  reflected  America’s  rejection 
of the English common law rule that a “person charged with
treason or felony was denied the aid of counsel”).3 

—————— 

3 To be sure, as the Court’s cases reveal, pre-ratification English law
and practices may supply background for some constitutional provisions.
But the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, did not purport to take
English law or history wholesale and silently download it into the U. S. 
Constitution.  See, e.g., Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U. S. 957, 975 (1991)
(opinion  of  Scalia,  J.)  (“Unless  one  accepts  the  notion  of  a  blind 
incorporation,  however,  the  ultimate  question  is  not  what  ‘cruell  and 
unusuall punishments’ meant in the [English] Declaration of Rights, but 
what  its  meaning  was  to  the  Americans  who  adopted  the  Eighth 
Amendment”).  Therefore, reflexively resorting to English law or history 
without careful analysis can sometimes be problematic because America 
had fought a war—and would soon fight another in 1812—to free itself 
from British law and practices and rid itself of tyrannical British rule. 
See  The  Federalist  No.  45,  p.  289  (C.  Rossiter  ed.  1961)  (J.  Madison)
(“Was,  then,  the  American  Revolution  effected,  was  the  American
Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the 
hard-earned  substance  of  millions  lavished,  not  that  the  people  of 
America  should  enjoy  peace,  liberty,  and  safety,”  but  that  they  should