Is the 7th Amendment Applicable to the State Courts? No. The Supreme Court declared that the right to a jury trial in a civil suit is not a fundamental aspect of due process or the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is therefore not applicable to state court proceedings. (Minneapolis and St. Louis R. Co. v. Bombolis, 241 U.S. 211 (1916)).
Gee, a court ruling, now that settles everything.
I wonder where that puts the Dred Scott decision.
How about the recent ruling upholding the McCain-Feingold bill against free speech?
The rulings upholding bans on guns?
In June 1776 Virginia’s state constitutional convention adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The declaration created basic civil liberties, including safeguards for accused persons: the right to call witnesses, the right against self-incrimination, a ban on excessive bails and fines, and due process of law. The declaration also banned widespread government searches, discouraged the creation of standing armies, and called for freedom of the press. James Madison, a delegate to the convention, successfully argued for the inclusion of a guarantee of freedom of religion.
Many colonies followed Virginia’s lead when they established new state governments. Traces of the Virginia bill soon appeared in the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware declarations. By 1781 Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and the provisional government of Vermont had all prefaced their constitutions with some type of bill of rights. Most other states, including New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Georgia, protected civil liberties through a bill of rights in their new constitutions or through new supplementary laws. Only Rhode Island and Connecticut continued to rely on common law and existing legal provisions to guarantee personal rights.
The idea of a bill of rights as a basic protection of civil liberties thus dates to the American Revolution. From 1776 to 1781, the eight bills of rights adopted by the states contained a total of 90 different provisions. Some were heavily tailored to local circumstances. Most shared provisions for jury trial, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms (weapons), the right to petition the government for change, and a range of other freedoms rooted in the Magna Carta and the English common law. Through their assertions of broad rights to freedom of speech and religion, however, these documents broke with English tradition. In addition, the American bills of rights went far beyond the English precedents by ordering restraints on the powers of government that had been unthinkable before 1776.
Thus, a Federal Bill of Right did only limit the Federal gov't, but only because the State already had protections for those freedoms.
New States entering the Union had to have a state Constitution consistent with the Constitution of the United States.