Slaughter-House Cases


The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36, was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution only protects the legal rights that are associated with federal citizenship, not those that pertain to state citizenship. The decision consolidated two similar cases.
Seeking to improve sanitary conditions, the Louisiana legislature and the city of New Orleans had established a corporation charged with regulating the slaughterhouse industry. Members of the Butchers' Benevolent Association challenged the constitutionality of the corporation, claiming that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment had been ratified in the aftermath of the American Civil War with the primary intention of protecting civil rights of millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the Southern United States, but the butchers argued that the amendment protected their right to "sustain their lives through labor."
In the majority opinion written by Associate Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, the Court held to a narrower interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment than the plaintiffs urged, ruling that it did not restrict the police powers exercised by Louisiana because the Privileges or Immunities Clause protected only those rights guaranteed by the United States, not individual states. In effect, the clause was interpreted to convey limited protection pertinent to a small minority of rights, such as the right to seek federal office.
In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that Miller's opinion effectively rendered the Fourteenth Amendment a "vain and idle enactment." Though the decision in the Slaughter-House Cases minimized the impact of the Privileges or Immunities Clause on state law, the Supreme Court would later strike down state laws on the basis of other clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment, including the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.

Background

One writer described New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century as plagued by "intestines and portions of putrefied animal matter lodged " whenever the tide from the Mississippi River was low; the offal came from the city's slaughterhouses. A mile and a half upstream from the city, 1,000 butchers gutted more than 300,000 animals per year. Animal entrails, dung, blood, and urine contaminated New Orleans's drinking water, which was implicated in cholera outbreaks among the population.
To try to control the problem, a New Orleans grand jury recommended that the slaughterhouses be moved south, but since many of the slaughterhouses were outside city limits, the grand jury's recommendations carried no weight. The city appealed to the state legislature. As a result, in 1869, the Louisiana legislature passed "An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans, to Locate the Stock Landings and Slaughter Houses, and to incorporate the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-House Company," which allowed the city of New Orleans to create a corporation that centralized all slaughterhouse operations in the city. At the time, New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia had similar provisions to confine butchers to areas in order to keep offal from contaminating the water supply.
The legislature chartered a private corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, to run a Grand Slaughterhouse at the southern part of the city, opposite the Mississippi River. Crescent City would not slaughter beef itself but act as a franchise corporation, by renting out space to other butchers in the city for a fee, under a designated maximum.
The statute also granted "sole and exclusive privilege of conducting and carrying on the livestock landing and slaughterhouse business within the limits and privilege granted by the act, and that all such animals shall be landed at the stock landings and slaughtered at the slaughterhouses of the company, and nowhere else. Penalties are enacted for infractions of this provision, and prices fixed for the maximum charges of the company for each steamboat and for each animal landed". The exclusivity would last for a period of 25 years. All other slaughterhouses would be closed up, forcing butchers to slaughter within the operation set up by Crescent City. The statute forbade Crescent City from favoring one butcher over another by promising harsh penalties for refusal to sell space to any butcher. All animals on the premises would be inspected by an officer appointed by the governor of the state.
Over 400 members of the Butchers' Benevolent Association joined together to sue to stop Crescent City's takeover of the slaughterhouse industry. In the background of his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller reiterated the concerns of the butchers:

This statute is denounced not only as creating a monopoly and conferring odious and exclusive privileges upon a small number of persons at the expense of the great body of the community of New Orleans, but it is asserted that it deprives a large and meritorious class of citizens—the whole of the butchers of the city—of the right to exercise their trade, the business to which they have been trained and on which they depend for the support of themselves and their families, and that the unrestricted exercise of the business of butchering is necessary to the daily subsistence of the population of the city.

The lower courts had found in favor of Crescent City in all cases.
Six cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. The butchers based their claims on the due process, privileges or immunities, and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified by the states five years earlier. It had been passed with the intention of protecting the civil rights of the millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the South, who had been granted citizenship in the United States.
The butchers' attorney, former Supreme Court Justice John Archibald Campbell, who had retired from the federal bench because of his Confederate loyalties, represented persons in a number of cases in New Orleans to obstruct Radical Reconstruction. Although the Fourteenth Amendment was passed mainly to protect the freedmen in the South, the language of Section 1 is not racially limited. Campbell used it to argue for a new, broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, in order to allow butchers of any race to "sustain their lives through labor."

Decision

In a 5–4 decision issued on April 14, 1873, by Justice Miller, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not forbid Louisiana's use of its police powers to regulate butchers. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause affected only rights of U.S. citizenship, i.e. rights which "owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws." The Court supported this holding by pointing to the previous clause in the Fourteenth Amendment which expressly distinguished between federal and state citizenship; the Citizenship Clause says, "All persons born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside." The Court elaborated:
So, according to the Court, the butchers' Fourteenth Amendment rights had not been violated. As author Jack Beatty has put it, the Court thought the Privileges or Immunities Clause only protected "access to ports and navigable waterways, the ability to run for federal office, and to be protected while on the high seas... they did not include what we call 'civil rights.'" The Court also mentioned some rights enumerated in the Constitution, as examples of privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States: "The right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, are rights of the citizen guaranteed by the Federal Constitution." But, the Court was wary of going further because, "in the absence of language which expresses such a purpose too clearly to admit of doubt," turning the entire field of civil rights and state police power over to the federal government would be too radical of a change:
At the time, the Court viewed due process in a procedural light rather than substantively. The Court also held that the amendment was intended primarily to protect former slaves: "It is so clearly a provision for that race and that emergency, that a strong case would be necessary for its application to any other."
Justice Stephen J. Field wrote in his dissent that Miller's opinion effectively rendered the Fourteenth Amendment a "vain and idle enactment."
Field accepted Campbell's reading of the amendment as not confined to protection of freed slaves but embracing the common law presumption in favor of an individual right to pursue a legitimate occupation. Field's reading of the due process clause of the amendment would prevail in future cases in which the court read the amendment broadly to protect personal interests against hostile state laws.

Subsequent developments

The victory of the Crescent City Company survived for only 11 years. By 1879, the State of Louisiana had adopted a new constitution prohibiting the state's ability to grant slaughterhouse monopolies, devolving regulation of cattle slaughter to parishes and municipalities, and banning the subordinate governmental units from granting monopoly rights over such activities. Having essentially lost its monopoly protection, the Crescent City Co. sued. That case ended in Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co., with the Supreme Court holding that Crescent City Co. did not have a contract with the state and so that revocation of the monopoly privilege was not a violation of the Contract Clause.

Contemporary analysis

professor Laurence Tribe wrote that "the Slaughter-House Cases incorrectly gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause." Similarly, Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar wrote, "Virtually no serious modern scholar—left, right, and center—thinks that Slaughter-House is a plausible reading of the Fourteenth Amendment."
On the other hand, Kevin Gutzman, contemporary U.S. constitutional scholar and historian, argues that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally meant to protect only "specifically federal rights" and describes the later, broader interpretation of the Amendment as "the Court's the Fourteenth Amendment to claim a capacious national judicial authority." Gutzman believes that "legal academics despise the Slaughterhouse decision because they do think the federal courts should be 'a perpetual censor upon all legislation in the States.'"
Kevin Newsom, who later became a federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2000 that the Slaughter-House Cases are consistent with using the Privileges or Immunities Clause to apply the federal Bill of Rights against the states, but not for applying unenumerated rights against the states.