It was at the heart of a redefinition of criminal justice by the Warren Court .The liberal interpretation of it by this court in turn became the target of a conservative attempt to diminish congressional power under the doctrine of "original intent" and to use the federal judiciary to return more authority to state and local government. At the beginning of the third millennium, the Supreme Court was bitterly divided over states" rights, with five justices generally seeking to curtail the application of laws and four justices insisting upon upholding Congress's power to apply the Bill of Rights to the states to prevent them from infringing on an individual's constitutional rights. When America declared independence from Great Britain in July 1776, it changed the historical English definition of sovereignty. As Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and other historians have pointed out, the American patriots made a radical and abrupt departure from the British tradition by stating in the Declaration of Independence " that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" and thereby placed sovereignty in the people. In the British system it had resided in Parliament, but in the new state constitutions of the 1770s and 1780s Americans, recognizing sovereignty of the people, made the rulers subordinate to the ruled.
The initial call for a convention had been only to revise the Articles, not to discard them out of hand and devise a totally new form of government.
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick pointed out in their 1993 study that the Age of Federalism was legitimate. (Written by Robert P. Sutton, Federalism-page 5.).
The federalists, better organized and more imaginative, had their selling point s, best summarized in the The Federalist, a series of essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay for the New York ratification contest.