The Slaughterhouse Cases were the Supreme Court’s first major interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, decided 5–4 on April 14, 1873, and they gutted the amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause almost as soon as it was ratified.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 The Court held that the amendment protected only a narrow set of rights tied to federal citizenship, leaving the rest — including the right to earn a living — under state control. That ruling has never been formally overruled. It shaped civil rights, economic regulation, and the balance between federal and state power for the next 150 years, and it still does.
The Louisiana Law That Sparked the Case
On March 8, 1869, Louisiana granted a single corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, the exclusive right to operate slaughterhouses, cattle landings, and stockyards in the New Orleans area for twenty-five years.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 Every other butcher in three surrounding parishes had to use Crescent City’s facilities and pay fees to do so, or face penalties for running an independent operation.2Law Library of Louisiana. The Slaughterhouse Cases – The Act
The state defended the law as a public health measure. Slaughterhouses upstream of New Orleans had been dumping animal waste into the Mississippi, contaminating the city’s water supply and contributing to cholera outbreaks.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 Consolidating slaughtering at one downstream facility, the legislature argued, would allow inspection and stop the pollution. Independent butchers saw a monopoly handed to a politically favored company. More than 400 of them, organized through the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, sued.
What the Butchers Argued
The butchers’ attorney turned the Reconstruction Amendments, written to protect formerly enslaved people, into a challenge to state economic regulation. Being forced to work under a single state-created monopoly, they argued, amounted to involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.3Oyez. Slaughter-House Cases
Their Fourteenth Amendment arguments were broader. They invoked three of its clauses at once: the Privileges or Immunities Clause, arguing the right to practice a trade was a privilege of national citizenship no state could revoke; the Due Process Clause, arguing the monopoly stripped them of liberty and property without legal justification; and the Equal Protection Clause, arguing the law singled out one company for special treatment.3Oyez. Slaughter-House Cases At its core, the case asked the Court to read the Fourteenth Amendment as a broad shield for individual economic freedom against state interference.
How the Court Ruled
Justice Samuel Miller, writing for a five-justice majority, rejected every argument. The opinion, cited as 83 U.S. 36 (1873), turned on a distinction most readers of the Fourteenth Amendment would never have expected: the difference between being a citizen of the United States and being a citizen of a state.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36
Miller pointed to the amendment’s text — “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — and concluded that two separate categories of citizenship existed, each with its own rights. The Privileges or Immunities Clause protected only rights that “owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.”4Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment Everything else, including the right to earn a living in a chosen trade, belonged to state citizenship and remained beyond federal reach.
The Short List of National Privileges
Miller then spelled out what rights actually qualified as privileges of national citizenship:
- The right to travel to Washington to transact business with the federal government or seek its protection
- Free access to seaports, sub-treasuries, land offices, and federal courts
- Federal protection of life, liberty, and property on the high seas or in foreign countries
- The right to use the navigable waters of the United States
- The writ of habeas corpus, and the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress
- The right to become a citizen of any state by establishing residence there
- Rights secured by treaties with foreign nations
Conspicuously absent: the right to work in a chosen profession, the right to own and operate a business, and virtually every other liberty people encounter in daily life. Those all belonged to the states.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36
The Due Process and Equal Protection Rulings
Miller dispatched the remaining claims quickly. The Due Process Clause did not serve as a general restraint on state economic regulation. Louisiana had exercised its police power to address a public health problem, and the Court would not second-guess that judgment. The Equal Protection Clause fared no better. Miller acknowledged it existed to protect formerly enslaved people from discriminatory state laws but doubted it would ever be applied beyond that narrow racial context. The Louisiana monopoly, in the majority’s view, was ordinary economic regulation, not racial discrimination.
The practical effect was sweeping. States remained free to regulate their citizens’ economic lives with almost no federal oversight, and the pre-war balance of power between federal and state authority survived at the precise moment the Reconstruction Amendments were supposed to be reshaping it.
The Dissents
Four justices — Field, Bradley, Swayne, and Chase — dissented, and their opinions read like they were written for a future generation. That turned out to be accurate.
Justice Field
Justice Stephen Field attacked the majority’s two-citizenships theory as a fatal misreading of the amendment. Its entire purpose was to place fundamental rights beyond hostile state legislatures. If the Privileges or Immunities Clause protected only Miller’s narrow list, most of which existed before the amendment, then it “was a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing and most unnecessarily excited Congress and the people on its passage.”1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36
For Field, the right to pursue a lawful occupation free from state-imposed monopolies was at the heart of American liberty, and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that right to all citizens, not just the formerly enslaved.3Oyez. Slaughter-House Cases
Justice Bradley
Justice Joseph Bradley grounded his dissent in property and due process. The right to choose an employment, he wrote, was “one of his most valuable rights, and one which the legislature of a State cannot invade, whether restrained by its own constitution or not.” A state could regulate how a trade was practiced through licenses, inspections, and safety rules. It could not “subvert the rights themselves” by handing an entire industry to one private company.5C-SPAN. Slaughterhouse Cases – Justice Bradley Dissent That distinction, between regulating a right and destroying it, would echo through American law for the next century.
Justice Swayne
Justice Noah Swayne added a short opinion emphasizing that the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to change the federal-state relationship. The first eleven amendments restrained the federal government; the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth were supposed to restrain the states. Reading the new amendments narrowly, Swayne warned, drained them of their transformative purpose.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36
Consequences for Civil Rights and Reconstruction
The Slaughterhouse Cases were not directly about race, but their consequences for Black Americans were severe. By confining the Privileges or Immunities Clause to a narrow band of federal rights, the Court left voting access, property ownership, freedom from violence, and access to public accommodations under the control of the same state governments that had maintained slavery.
Three years later, United States v. Cruikshank (1876) reinforced the framework. The Court held that the Bill of Rights did not create new rights but merely secured existing ones against federal interference, and because those rights did not “owe their existence to the Constitution,” they fell outside the Privileges or Immunities Clause as Slaughterhouse had defined it.4Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment State governments were left free to deny fundamental rights with no federal remedy.
Southern states took full advantage. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses suppressed Black voting. Segregation laws separated schools, transportation, and public facilities. The narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment did not cause Jim Crow by itself, but it removed the constitutional barrier that might have prevented it.
How Substantive Due Process Filled the Gap
The Slaughterhouse majority killed the Privileges or Immunities Clause as a meaningful source of individual rights. Bradley’s argument that the right to earn a living was protected by the Due Process Clause survived, and eventually reshaped the law through a different door.
Lawyers who wanted federal courts to protect fundamental rights had to route their arguments through due process instead. This workaround produced the doctrine now known as substantive due process: the idea that the Due Process Clause protects not just fair procedures but the substance of certain fundamental rights.
Its most famous application came in Lochner v. New York (1905), where the Court struck down a state law limiting bakery workers’ hours. The “right to make a contract in relation to his business,” the majority held, was “part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Lochner v. New York This was essentially Field’s Slaughterhouse dissent repackaged as due process, and this time it won. The Lochner Era lasted roughly three decades, during which the Court regularly struck down minimum wage laws, maximum hour laws, and other labor regulations.
The economic-liberty version of substantive due process collapsed in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937). The broader concept survived, and now protects personal liberties like privacy, family autonomy, and marriage rather than economic interests.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Lochner v. New York Because the Slaughterhouse majority gutted the clause designed to protect fundamental rights, the Court spent the next century and a half building that protection through a clause designed to guarantee fair process.
The Modern Status of the Privileges or Immunities Clause
For most of American history after 1873, the Privileges or Immunities Clause sat dormant. That began to change at the end of the twentieth century.
In Saenz v. Roe (1999), the Supreme Court relied on the clause for the first time since Slaughterhouse to strike down a state law. California had limited welfare benefits for new residents to whatever their previous state would have paid. The Court held this violated the clause’s protection of the right to travel: once a person establishes residency in a new state, they are entitled to the same privileges as its other citizens.7Legal Information Institute (Cornell Law School). Saenz v. Roe The ruling was narrow, but it proved the clause was not entirely dead.
A more direct challenge came in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), which applied the Second Amendment to state and local governments. The majority used the Due Process Clause. Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring separately, argued the Court should overrule Slaughterhouse and use the Privileges or Immunities Clause instead, applying the Bill of Rights to the states directly and making selective incorporation through due process unnecessary.8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v. City of Chicago
Thomas repeated his view in Timbs v. Indiana (2019), which applied the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines to the states. Again the majority used due process. Again Thomas argued the Privileges or Immunities Clause was the correct path, noting the Court had “marginalized” the clause in the late nineteenth century by defining its protections “quite narrowly,” forcing litigants to find “an alternative fount of such rights” in due process. No other justice has joined his position, and the Slaughterhouse framework technically remains good law.
Why the Ruling Still Matters
The Slaughterhouse Cases occupy an unusual place in constitutional law: almost everyone agrees the decision was wrong, but no court has formally overruled it. The ruling neutered the Privileges or Immunities Clause, forced the development of substantive due process as a workaround, weakened federal power to protect civil rights during Reconstruction, and helped create the conditions in which Jim Crow flourished. The dissenters’ vision of the Fourteenth Amendment as a broad guarantee of fundamental rights against state interference is far closer to how modern courts actually interpret the amendment, though they get there through the Due Process Clause rather than the one the framers most likely intended. The Privileges or Immunities Clause remains the road not taken, and the consequences of that detour run through nearly every major civil rights and individual liberty decision that followed.