Bill of Rights · 9th Amendment
Ninth Amendment
Ratified December 15, 1791
Verbatim
Exact text as ratified.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Plain English
A translation that drops archaic words but keeps the meaning, including the parts courts still argue about.
Just because a right is not specifically listed in the Constitution does not mean the people do not have it. Listing some rights does not deny or diminish other rights the people keep.
What this means for you
The Ninth Amendment is a rule about how to read the Constitution, not a list of specific rights. It tells courts: do not assume that because a right is not in the Bill of Rights, it does not exist.
In practice, the Ninth Amendment is rarely the sole basis for a ruling. Courts have used it as supporting reasoning in cases recognizing rights not explicitly named in the Constitution, most famously the right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). But almost all of those rulings rest more heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause than on the Ninth.
The amendment matters most as a principle: the founders did not want the listing of specific rights to be read as the complete list of rights that exist. Rights not in the Constitution can still be real. They just have to be established through other legal means.
About
The Ninth Amendment was added in part to address a concern raised during the ratification debates: that listing specific rights might suggest the federal government had power over everything not listed. James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, wanted to prevent this reading.
The amendment is rarely used as the sole basis for a court ruling. Justice Arthur Goldberg's concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) is the most famous example of the Ninth being used to support a constitutional right (privacy in marriage), but even there, the majority opinion rested on different reasoning. Most modern unenumerated-rights cases rely on the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause instead.
Legal scholars debate what the Ninth Amendment was meant to do. Some read it as a robust source of unenumerated rights that courts should actively enforce. Others read it as a limit on federal power rather than a source of individual rights. Others read it as a rule of construction with no independent enforceable content. This debate has not been resolved by the Supreme Court.