The following is copied, with permission, from e-mail correspondence with Kenneth Kato, Archives Specialist in the National Archives' Center for Legislative Archives. Dominic·t14:43, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As for the entry on the Bill of Rights, I did have a number of reactions. I found the entry full of information with no errors that I could see. The citations were above average.
The biggest issues that I could see concerned focus and organization. This left me with a sense that the entry was quite fragmented. (This may be, however, due to the nature of an encyclopedia entry - I don't know.) Here are the specifics:
Why does the background on the Constitution's ratification come before the English foundations for individual rights?
Why the exclusive reliance on a Federalist essay to cover the entire Ratification debates over a bill of rights when there is also a rich amount of resources now available on the press debates (pro & con) and the individual convention debates in the states?
Why no discussion of the legislative process of getting the Bill of Rights thru Congress? This may be the educator part of me, but this does offer a "teachable moment" on both the general legislative process and the constitutional amendment process in a bicameral legislature. This means you lose the opportunity of touching on the drama of Madison trying to convince the House to pay attention to the call for a bill of rights.
Why not have a section focusing on the legislative process? One of the more interesting documents we have here in the Center for Legislative Archives is the Senate mark-up of the House-passed bill of rights. When we show this document to visitors many are struck at how much editing & amending was done to a document that we now think of as chiseled in stone. Madison boiled 200 proposed amendments from the ratification conventions to 17 which the Senate boils down further into 12.
Why so little on the judicial debate over incorporating the bill of rights to the states? A richer discussion would allow the entry to raise questions about the nature of a federal system (what belongs to the state and what belongs to the federal government?) and the changing nature of the Federal Government (why have a bill of rights when the Federal Government was not expected to touch individuals directly during the early republic?). There is also the drama of the debate between Justice Black who pushed the argument that the 14th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to the states, & Justice Frankfurter who disagreed over a series of cases with the footnotes often laying out the cut & thrust of their debate (Adamson, Duncan, & others).
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