<P> The original interpretation of the United States Bill of Rights was that only the Federal Government was bound by it . In 1835, the U.S. Supreme Court in Barron v Baltimore unanimously ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states . During post-Civil War Reconstruction, the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 to rectify this condition, and to specifically apply the whole of the Constitution to all U.S. states . In 1873, the Supreme Court essentially nullified the key language of the 14th Amendment that guaranteed all "privileges and immunities" to all U.S. persons, in a series of cases called the Slaughterhouse cases . This decision and others allowed post-emancipation racial discrimination to continue largely unabated . </P> <P> Later Supreme Court justices found a way around these limitations without overturning the Slaughterhouse precedent: they created a concept called Selective Incorporation . Under this legal theory, the court used the remaining 14th Amendment protections for equal protection and due process to "incorporate" individual elements of the Bill of Rights against the states . "The test usually articulated for determining fundamentality under the Due Process Clause is that the putative right must be' implicit in the concept of ordered liberty', or' deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition ."' Compare page 267 Lutz v. City of York, Pa., 899 F. 2d 255 - United States Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit, 1990 . </P> <P> This set in motion a continuous process under which each individual right under the Bill of Rights was incorporated, one by one . That process has extended more than half a century, with the free speech clause of the First Amendment first incorporated in 1925 in Gitlow v New York . The most recent amendment completely incorporated as fundamental was the Second Amendment right to possess and bear arms for personal self - defense, in McDonald v Chicago, handed down in 2010 . </P> <P> Not all clauses of all amendments have been incorporated . For example, states are not required to obey the Fifth Amendment's requirement of indictment by grand jury . Many states choose to use preliminary hearings instead of grand juries . It is possible that future cases may incorporate additional clauses of the Bill of Rights against the states . </P>

Examples of fundamental rights protected by the constitution