hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 3 of the ap government curriculum and in this video that means it's time to talk about the doctrine of selective incorporation so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it so in this video here's what we're trying to do explain the implications of the doctrine of selective incorporation okay so if we're going to explain the implications of selective incorporation i reckon we ought to define the term first selective incorporation is the process by which the bill of rights is applied to the states and if that still doesn't make sense to you let me explain it up real nice so in this unit we've talked a lot about the bill of rights which is to say the first 10 amendments to the constitution and in those 10 amendments we have laid out for us our civil liberties to which we are entitled as citizens of the united states but remember when the bill of rights was ratified shortly after the constitution was ratified these were protections of our civil liberties against the federal government so that means we have the right to the free exercise of religion and the federal government cannot suppress that we have the right to a jury trial and the federal government cannot suppress that but here's where i tell you that although the federal government was constrained in this way the state governments were not and while some competing interpretations of individual liberties were debated between the state and federal governments in the early part of the republic it really didn't become a big issue until after the civil war as you know the north fought the south and won that war and one of the concerns of congress after the war was that the racial hierarchy that had so long defined southern culture would lead to the systematic oppression of the newly freed black population after all these former enslaved people thanks to the 13th amendment were now citizens of the united states and that meant that the bill of rights applied to them also but at that point what was to keep those rebellious southern states from infringing upon the liberty of the free black population the solution was the 14th amendment and this one is important so make sure you know it well the 14th amendment says this no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the united states in other words yes the federal government must be restrained from infringing on the rights of citizens and now the states are held to that same standard but it wasn't as if all 10 amendments were wholesale applied at the state level at the same time mostly this process of applying the bill of rights to the states has been an affair of the supreme court and so every time a case comes up and the ruling applies one of the first 10 amendments to the states that process is called selective incorporation okay now that we know what selective incorporation is let me give you two examples of it one in which the supreme court upheld the state law and one in which state laws were overturned so the first example comes in a non-required case called reynolds v the united states in 1879 in this case a utah man named george reynolds had himself a plurality of wives and you know he was a mormon and in those days the practice of polygamy was an important doctrine of the mormon church so even though utah state outlawed polygamy reynolds argued that his religion required him to continue adding to his pantheon of wives and furthermore the utah government needed to stay out of it because reynolds is right to the free exercise of religion well the supreme court went ahead and disagreed with him on this count and said that while it would surely be unconstitutional for a state to legislate against a person's belief in polygamy they could definitely legislate against the practice of it so that's an example of the supreme court upholding a state law in the process of selective incorporation and now let's have a look at when the court went the other way and for that let's consider one of your required cases namely mcdonald v chicago in 2010. now i've got a whole video explaining the details of this case but here we'll just talk in generality so recall in the unit 3 topic 5 video we talked about the case heller v district of columbia in which the supreme court overturned the restrictive gun laws in washington dc however since dc is a federal district that ruling did not apply to the states but that's where mcdonald v chicago comes in so chicago had a law requiring all handguns to be registered but the kick in the face was that the city had rejected all registration of those guns since the early 80s in other words while handguns were like technically legal in reality it was an impossibility to own one and so the case was brought before the supreme court in the wake of the heller decision and it was argued that if the court ruled that the second amendment allowed citizens of washington dc to own handguns that should also be the case for the states and the court agreed but narrowly in a 5-4 decision and in that way the second amendment was incorporated to the states the last thing i'll say is this we've talked about what it means to incorporate the bill of rights to the states but what is the selective part of it talking about well remember what i said earlier namely that the first 10 amendments were not wholesale applied to the state as a case comes up then corporation happens selectively in other words not all at once and at this point the first second fourth fifth sixth and eighth amendments have all been selectively incorporated to the states through various scotus decisions okay if you need more help then click right here and review packet which is gonna help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam in may if this video helped you and you want me to keep making them then by all means subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out