ABSTRACT

Gitlow v. New York is the real beginning of the incorporation doctrine in Supreme Court rulings. The significance of the incorporation doctrine is that it has allowed the Supreme Court, over the years, to offer guarantees to individual liberty that might not have been protected by the states. The incorporation doctrine is a concept that often is difficult to grasp for some students. Gitlow’s lawyers lost on the first point in which they argued that his speech should have been protected by the First Amendment. In the Gitlow ruling, the Court stated that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause bound the individual states to adhere to portions of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The notion that states must provide the protections guaranteed by the US Constitution forever changed the balance of power between the states and the federal government.