Slaughter-House Cases

the citizens of each state should be entitled to equal treatment with other citizens in the other states.

Um, and that is, uh... that reading, however orthodox and however well-established it, it, it may seem, it was not actually well-established before the 14th Amendment, and really before the Slaughter-House Cases.

And it's a very complicated history, but [coughs] briefly said, the motive for, the motive for Article 4, Section 2 is probably largely state-centric.

The, the, the, the authors of the Article 4 did not think of themselves as trying to deal with states, um, treating their own citizens as sub-citizens or as effectively aliens in their own state.

And this is, uh, another part of the discontinuity, is the Slaughter-House reading places these two in very separate parallel, as far as the East is from the West.

They, they parallel, but they're very different, um, and that's, um, that's, that's part of the loss of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Um, as, as just as, uh, B- Matthew Carpenter said, I, and I point this out in the conclusion, at the end of the Slaughter-House cases, in which he won, he won the case, he was, he just said, "What the court just did," he said this in a public speech, "was contrary to what everybody thought when they made this sharp distinction between these two different privileges and immunities." Um, they were supposed to be the same ones.

So, um, the, that's, that itself is, I, I only begin this, that part of the story of my conclusion.

So you mentioned how you might do this today if the slaughterhouse was overturned and this became the law of the land or what have you.

And there are difficulties with that because we have Erie.

But say we're back in 1868 and someone was trying to put together a case like the slaughterhouse cases.

If, say, IJ was operating in 1869 and we're trying to do a constitutional lawsuit about the right to earn a living, how would we think about it differently than, say, people who support us perhaps today but think about it in terms of a natural rights standpoint? Yeah.

I mean, so I'll say, I don't know that we have anything to add to Justice Fields' dissent, which in some ways is drawing on this a lot, this kind of general law approach.

And, and justice Miller saw that on the horizon perhaps and thought, we're just not going to do that.

Yeah.

I mean, as you know, and as many listeners know also, you know, the setup of Slaughterhouse does also have some weird racial politics where the, you know, in many ways, the people who are seen as the, you know, the plaintiffs are seen as the bad guys or people who, and the defendants and the regulators are seen as more in sympathy with the, you know, the reconstruction government.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was steadily narrowing the reach of the new Reconstruction amendments.

The first cases that made it to the United States Supreme Court dealing with the interpretation of the 14th Amendment are known as the Slaughterhouse Cases.

At question was the constitutionality of an 1869 Louisiana law that incorporated the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughterhouse Company and granted it the exclusive right to butcher livestock in the city of New Orleans.

On its surface, the law was supposed to protect public health by reducing the amount of waste created by the mass slaughter of animals in the butchering industry.

The butchers claimed that by denying them the property right to practice their livelihood without state interference, Louisiana had violated their rights under the 13th Amendment.

Also, they claimed that by creating a monopoly that favored some citizens at the cost of others, Louisiana had violated their rights under the 14th Amendment as well.

A consolidation of several of these suits came to be known as the Slaughterhouse Cases and reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873.

A 5-4 majority ruled in favor of the state of Louisiana and against the Butchers.

Regarding the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, this clause protects the rights of national citizenship.

Because its scope was interpreted to be so incredibly narrow following the Slaughter-House Cases in the eighteen hundreds, it is almost never the correct answer on the MBE.

Examiners use it as a highly attractive distractor because it sounds exactly like the Article four Privileges and Immunities Clause.

If you see the Fourteenth Amendment version, eliminate it immediately, unless the facts explicitly involve the right of a newly arrived citizen to travel and establish residency in a new state and be treated equally.

But April 14, 1873, is in some ways one of those days we could call in American history a day of infamy.

The Supreme Court that day, at least it's the date of the decision, even though it was Easter Sunday, handed down its decision five to four in the Slaughterhouse Cases, so-called, a collection of five cases that came out of Louisiana, which was the Court's first major ruling on the Civil War amendments, on the meaning of the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, and in effect the Fifteenth Amendments.

That day, same day, Easter Sunday, in Colfax, Louisiana, a town, not very big, named for Schuyler Colfax, the vice president of the United States in the Grant administration, in Grant Parish, renamed by the Republican regime for Ulysses Grant.

The largest mass murder of Americans ever in American history occurred in the political violence stemming from the divided election in Louisiana back in the fall of 1872.

Justice Samuel Miller for the majority argued that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were intended, this was the good part of the decision, to end slavery and advance the rights of the freedmen.

But he made a sharp distin-- in, in other words, not to protect a bunch of white butchers in New Orleans.

And by the way, the lead lawyer for the butchers in the Slaughterhouse Cases was none other than a man named John A. Campbell, a Georgia-born former member of the Supreme Court.

He had been part of the six-man majority in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, resigned his position on the US Supreme Court in 1861 to go home and fight for the Confederacy.

In this first of three installments, we will examine American law after the Civil War, specifically in regard to the rise of truly national corporations, the plight of industrial workers and farmers, classical legal thought, the recrafting of the 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court for the benefit of property and business interests.

We'll take a close look at the first important case concerning the 14th Amendment, the slaughterhouse cases, and its enduring legacy.

As you will recall from our episodes on the Civil War, in its wake, The Constitution was reborn in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Once the Radical Republicans took charge of Reconstruction, they used these amendments, along with several other legislative acts, in an effort to change Southern society completely.

Now, the transformation of due process into a substantive right evolved in the Supreme Court slowly after the Civil War.

The first opinion, one we have discussed in the past under the 14th Amendment, spoke to a more restrictive interpretation.

In 1873, the court handed down its ruling in the slaughterhouse cases.

They involved an 1869 Louisiana state statute that that granted the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughterhouse Company an exclusive 25-year monopoly over livestock landing and slaughtering operations in New Orleans.