ABSTRACT
In the federal system of government in United States, the nation exist under fifty-one constitutions, one national document and one for each state. The US Constitution and separate state constitutions, both designed to create governments and set out scope of their powers, share many features, including the protection of individual rights. The US Constitution does this through the Bill of Rights, made up of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. State constitutions with bills of rights predated the ratification of the federal Bill of Rights in 1791. Consequently, until the federal protections took effect, the state charters provided the only explicit protections of citizens' rights and liberties in governmental system. After the push for inclusion of a bill of rights in US Constitution to provide the same guarantees against the federal government that citizens had against their state governments, the First Congress, at the insistence of James Madison, began considering amendments to the Constitution setting out rights of citizens.
