Slaughterhouse Cases (SC Privileges Immunities)
Case Overview
The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873), held 5-4 that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only rights that are peculiarly attributable to national citizenship, not the right to pursue a lawful occupation or other civil rights traditionally governed by state law. The decision effectively gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause before it could do meaningful work in protecting individual rights against state action. The clause has remained largely dormant in constitutional law for over 150 years.
Legal Issues
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The Facts
Louisiana enacted the Slaughter-House Act of 1869, which consolidated the New Orleans slaughterhouse business into a single corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, granting it a twenty-five-year monopoly over slaughtering operations in and near New Orleans. Independent butchers, displaced from their trade, sued. They argued the monopoly infringed their right to pursue a lawful occupation, a right they claimed was protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
The Application
The butchers contended that Louisiana's monopoly violated the Privileges or Immunities Clause by depriving them of the freedom to pursue a lawful occupation, a right they argued was essential to United States citizenship. The Court rejected this claim by adopting a narrow reading of the clause: only rights of distinctly national origin—such as access to federal offices or rights flowing from the federal government's sovereignty—qualified as privileges or immunities of United States citizenship. Occupational freedom, the majority held, was an incident of state citizenship, not national citizenship, and therefore fell outside the clause's protection. This interpretation insulated the monopoly from federal constitutional challenge and left the butchers' remedies, if any, to state law alone.
The Conclusion
The Slaughterhouse Cases effectively foreclosed the Privileges or Immunities Clause as a vehicle for broad constitutional protection of civil rights against state action, a reading that dissenting Justices Field and Bradley argued betrayed the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision was never formally overruled but has been widely criticized, and the Court's subsequent incorporation of Bill of Rights protections through the Due Process Clause has developed largely as a doctrinal workaround for the limitation imposed by Slaughterhouse. The case remains foundational to Bryan's coverage of Fourteenth Amendment history and the ongoing debate over whether the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause should be restored.
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