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by FesterCluck 3945 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
1 comments

The 9th Amendment was infamously vestigial for most of US history. There were until the New Deal very few SCOTUS cases that even mentioned it, let alone turned on it. In the few cases in which appellants hoped to rely on a notion of "unenumerated yet extant rights", SCOTUS rejected the interpretation.

History also doesn't do much to support an argument that the 9th hides a right to "privacy". The original drafts of the 9th Amendment weren't about unenumerated rights, but about state and local rights versus the power of the federal government. The language was bickered over, but apparently much of the jurisprudence of the 9th that happened anywhere close to the time of the founders was about devolution of state and local power.

See for instance Hugo Black's dissent in Griswold:

    [The Ninth] Amendment was passed, not to
    broaden the powers of this Court or any
    other department of the [Federal
    Government], but as every student of
    history knows, to assure the people that
    the Constitution . ..was intended to
    limit the Federal Government to the
    powers granted expressly or by necessary
    implication. If any broad, unlimited
    power to hold laws unconstitutional
    because they offend what this Court
    conceives to be the "[collective]
    conscience of our people" is vested in
    this Court by the Ninth Amendment
    . . . , it was not given by the Framers,
    but rather has been bestowed on th[is]
    Court by th[is] Court.7