Slaughterhouse Cases Gut Fourteenth Amendment Protections

The Supreme Court issues a 5-4 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases, its first major interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, drastically narrowing the Privileges or Immunities Clause to exclude most individual rights. The ruling upholds Louisiana’s grant of a slaughterhouse monopoly to one company while simultaneously opening the door for states to curtail civil rights and for corporations to claim constitutional protections.

The case involves Louisiana’s 1869 law granting Crescent City Livestock Landing & Slaughterhouse Company exclusive rights to all livestock slaughtering in New Orleans, forcing independent butchers to either close or pay to use Crescent City’s facilities. White butchers challenge this as violating their Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The Court rules the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only limited federal citizenship rights, not the broader individual rights the butchers claim.

This narrow interpretation creates catastrophic consequences. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe argues the Court “incorrectly gutted” the Privileges or Immunities Clause, while Akhil Amar notes “virtually no serious modern scholar—left, right and center—thinks that [Slaughterhouse] is a plausible reading of the Amendment.” The decision allows Southern states to implement Jim Crow laws while simultaneously enabling corporate lawyers to claim Fourteenth Amendment protections under Due Process. Between 1868-1912, the Court hears 312 Fourteenth Amendment cases: only 28 involve African Americans, while 288 involve corporations challenging regulations—a complete inversion of the amendment’s intended purpose.