VIRGINIA DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

VIRGINIA DECLARATION OF RIGHTS was formulated by George Mason. A convention of members of the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted this listing of first principles of government and of civil liberties on 12 June 1776, seventeen days before it adopted the constitution that made Virginia an independent state. Virginia's Declaration of Rights furnished a model for similar declarations in other state constitutions and also for the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution (the Bill of Rights).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Willi Paul. The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era. Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber, trans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980.

Conley, Patrick T., and John P. Kaminski, eds. The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties. Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1992.

Rutland, Robert A. The Birth of the Bill of Rights, 1776–1791. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1955.

Rutland, Robert A., ed. The Papers of George Mason: 1725–1792. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

Veit, Helen E., Kenneth R. Bowling, and Charlene Bangs Bickford, eds. Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Matthew PageAndrews/c. p.

See alsoBill of Rights in U.S. Constitution ; Constitution of the United States ; Coutume de Paris andvol. 9:Virginia Declaration of Rights .