Rather than searching for evidence of courts taking an individual rights
view, it might make more sense to seek evidence from near the Founding
of anyone taking the "collective rights" view. I confidently predict you
will find none, because it was first introduced in the late 20th century
to rationalize gun control, and would have been thought bizarre by the
Founders, for whom all rights were inherently individual. For them,
rights, which would be called "immunities" by the framers of the 14th
Amendment, were restrictions on the power of officials to act against
individuals. ("Privileges" were created by government, by contrast to
"immunities", which preceded government.) Even something like voting (a
privilege), which can only meaningfully be exercised on a collective
occasion, is still individual, not collective.
It is not likely to be productive, after an issue has been misframed by
partisans, to seek historical evidence of it being otherwise framed in
the past, because anyone can always invent some new way to misframe an
issue that previous generations would never have thought of and would
produce no evidence on the matter one way or another.
This is perhaps negatively illustrated by the absence of attempts to
exhaustively list ("enumerate") all rights ("privileges and
immunities"), an effort which Justice Bushrod Washington found to be
"more tedious than difficult" in /Corfield v. Coryell/ (6 Fed. Cas. 546,
no. 3,230 C.C.E.D.Pa. 1823)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_citation>, before making an effort to
broadly list a few of them. Even the state ratifying conventions in
their proposed amendments did not attempt to list them exhaustively. I
have tried to do that in *Presumption of Nonauthority and Unenumerated
Rights, *http://www.constitution.org/9ll/schol/pnur.htm . It can be done
by proceeding from a higher level of abstraction and then working down
to more specific levels, but people in the Founding Era were more
accustomed to thinking in terms of more specific rights arising from
particular disputes, without getting around to abstracting them
systematically. We have made some philosophic progress in 232 years.
As an aside, the cases Eugene found illustrate something else: the
original standard of due process according to which issues of law were
supposed to be argued in the presence of the jury. See */Stettinius v.
United States/*, 22 F. Cas. 1322 (1839); 5 Cranch C.C. 573,
http://www.constitution.org/usfc/fc/22/Stettinius_v_US.htm .
-- Jon
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