What does the ninth amendment mean?
I doubt it will be productive to look for an “official” interpretation of the Ninth Amendment (as many people have different readings of the few cases that exist– and different views about whether those cases are correct), but there is a lot of scholarship about what it means. You could start with this relatively accessible article by Professor Randy Barnett, which lays out five major academic theories of the amendment (and argues for the one that Professor Barnett finds most persuasive). Another very good source is Professor Kurt Lash’s book, The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment— it is an expensive academic-press book but you might be able to get it through a library.
I don’t follow what you are saying ROU_Xenophobe. And this might be why I can’t understand how it is currently interpreted. It seems like this renders the whole Amendment meaningless. What would a Ninth Amendment right be under this interpretation? I guess privacy was something that came up in some cases related to Roe v. Wade, but then the court said that privacy wasn’t a right under the Ninth Amendment. It sounds like you are saying that the Amendment means that you have rights that exist only as long as the government decides not to take them away. When the government decides to take them away, then they aren’t rights any more. This interpretation of the Ninth Amendment would be very different from say the First Amendment or the Second Amendment, where the whole point is that the government can’t take away these rights. If there is a conflict between the powers of the government and the first few rights in the Bill of Rights, the rights seem to get some recognition in court cases. I
