Thankful for Amendments?

The other night in class, we were posed the question, "Which Amendment is most important to you?" Being a women's history class, the majority of students said the nineteenth. (All the amendments can be found here.) So, that is the question I pose to you? Which Amendment is the most important in your life?

What was my answer? Well, I actually had a hard time answering the question. This is partly because I am a legal historian who studies Constitutional law. My thesis focused heavily on the Fourteenth amendment and how it has influenced individual lives. I do believe our legal system would be different without it. However, I am very politically active and do believe the Nineteenth plays an important part in my life. Finally, in my opinion, there is something special about the First amendment, which seems to me to lay out American freedoms very succinctly. So, aloud, my answer was the First, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth (in no particular order).

That was my answer, aloud. Internally, I struggled for a moment because I've also just finished reading The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction by Akhil Reed Amar. And his close reading of the first ten amendments, or (should I say twelve?) followed by how the Fourteenth changed their interpretation made me hesitate. In the heat of the moment in a classroom situation, you simply answer the question posed. But now, sitting at home, pondering history as history nerds are wont to do, I wonder what my answer would have been at the time of the writing of the Constitution. (Actually, my first ponder is would I have been a Federalist?)

Given just the Bill of Rights, and Amar's interpretation, I think I may have chosen the Third amendment as the most important to me. In my mind, the fear of quartering troops and standing armies as a threat to freedom and liberty loomed large at the time.