ABSTRACT
Absent limitations within their own constitutions, state governments were free to pass or retain laws that would be clearly unconstitutional if enacted by Congress. Only after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment did the US Supreme Court apply the limitations of the Bill of Rights to state and local units of government. This application of the Bill of Rights to all levels of nonfederal government was called incorporation, because the fundamental liberties protected by the Bill of Rights were deemed to have been incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court in Barron held that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and thus offered no remedy to citizens whose arguments were with their states. The proper approach to incorporation was the subject of significant disagreement among justices of the Court, with Justice Hugo L. Black (1886-1971) arguing for total incorporation and Justices Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) and William J. Brennan Jr. (1906-1997) urging the selective approach that ultimately prevailed.
