Question

A. Explain how the Court has interpreted the Fourteenth amendment to apply the Bill of Rights to the states.

Answer 1

Keeping it brief, the Court -- little by little -- gradually asserted that certain rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are, in some way, "in" the 14th too; that the 14th protects those rights from being violated by the states. But the Court never said that all of the rights in the Bill of Rights are "in" the 14th. Over the course of many decades the Court kept on expanding the list of which rights in the BoR are "in" the 14th, but all along the way the Court kept on saying too, that not all of the rights are "in." By the 1960's *most* of the rights in the BoR were "absorbed" into the 14th.