¶ … First Amendment The doctrine of incorporation was traced to the Quincy Railroad vs. City of Chicago (1897) where the Supreme Court required state to offer compensation to the property appropriated by either the local government or state government. In the Gitlow v. New York (1925), the court also expressly held States to protect the freedom of speech. Since 1920s, the Court has been steadily incorporating a significant part of the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment is one of the basic provisions of Bill of Rights, which is the backbone of American liberty that guarantees freedom of press, speech, religion, and petition. While some provisions of the First Amendment have been selectively incorporated into the Bill of Rights, however, some provisions have still faced challenges in selectively incorporated. The doctrine of selective incorporation has led to a long lasting debate in the United States revealing whether the Bill of Rights provisions are applicable to the states. The first interpretation of the Bill of Rights was delivered in 1868 during the Slaughterhouse Cases. However, the U.S. courts started to incorporate selective doctrine in some of the Bill of Rights provisions in the early 20th century. The selective incorporation consists of legal doctrine designed to protect the immunities, rights and privileges of American citizens against the state laws. Since the inception of the American constitution, the relationship between the federal government and state government is faulty. After the U.S. government had passed the First Amendment, the Supreme Court had passed series of judgments weighing the rights of the American citizens. Over the years, the results has led to the passage of the incorporation of Bill of Rights that protect individual citizens against abuse of states' powers.

Objective of the paper is to explore the doctrine selective incorporation

Selective Incorporation

The Selective incorporation is the United States constitutional doctrine that has evolved through court ruling...

In other words, selective incorporation refers to a constitutional doctrine to ensure that states do not have the power to take away the rights of American citizens, which have been included in the Bill of Rights. For example, the U.S. constitutions includes freedom of speech, religion, and assembly in the Bill of Rights applicable in the First Amendments. Between 1940s and 1970s, the Supreme Court had gradually passed a series of decisions to incorporate several provisions of Bill of Rights, which had been biding against states.
Typically, the origin of the doctrine of selective incorporation has started since the beginning of the United States. During the time the U.S. was drafting its constitution, there was a heated debate on the relationships between the federal government and the right of states. When the U.S. constitution came into force, there was a debate about the method of incorporating the federal laws into the state laws. When the law makers added tenth amendment in the U.S. constitution to protect American citizens from the federal government abuse of rights, the law did not define whether people should be protected from state government. When the U.S. constitution was being enacted, there was a concern about how to incorporate the federal laws into the state laws. Other concern was how to prevent states from enacting the laws that would not infringe on the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. (Patterson, 2012).

While the goals of selective incorporation is to protect the rights of citizen against the infringement of states, however, its application in the state is challenging. Following the supremacy of the states' laws against the individual citizens, the federal government passed the First Amendment that protects the rights, and privileges of citizens against the encroachment of states. Shortly after the federal government passed the 14th Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court restricted the Bill of Rights' application…