The Slaughter-House Cases were an 1873 Supreme Court decision, decided 5-4, that gave the Fourteenth Amendment its first major interpretation and read its Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly that the clause has been nearly useless for protecting individual rights against state governments ever since. The case grew out of a Louisiana law giving one company a monopoly over New Orleans slaughtering, but its real significance lies in what the Court said about federal power to protect civil rights.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
The Louisiana Law Behind the Lawsuit
New Orleans in the late 1860s had a genuine sanitation crisis. Roughly a thousand people worked in the meat trade daily, hundreds of small slaughterhouses operated across a three-parish area of more than 1,100 square miles, and animal waste flowed into the same waterways that supplied the city’s drinking water. Cholera outbreaks followed.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
In 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed “An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans,” which handed a single company, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, a twenty-five-year exclusive franchise over Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes. Every other butcher in the area had to use the company’s facility and pay it fees. Slaughtering outside the monopoly carried a $250 fine per violation.2Law Library of Louisiana. The Slaughterhouse Cases: The Act
The law mixed a real public health rationale with obvious favoritism toward politically connected owners. Independent butchers, organized as the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, sued.
What the Butchers Argued
The butchers’ lawyer, former Supreme Court Justice John Archibald Campbell, built the challenge around the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified only the year before the Louisiana law passed. It was the first time anyone had asked a court to strike down a state law under that amendment.
Campbell advanced claims under three of its clauses. The lead argument invoked the Privileges or Immunities Clause: the right to practice a trade, he contended, was a fundamental privilege of American citizenship that no state could take away.3Constitution Annotated. Amdt14.S1.2.1 Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases He also argued that the state had destroyed the butchers’ property without due process and that the monopoly denied them equal protection. For good measure, he claimed that being forced to work inside the monopoly’s facility was a form of involuntary servitude barred by the Thirteenth Amendment.4Constitution Center. The Slaughter-House Cases
The Court’s Ruling
Justice Samuel Freeman Miller wrote for the five-justice majority and rejected every argument. The monopoly stood.
The heart of the opinion was a distinction Miller drew from the amendment’s own text. The Fourteenth Amendment refers to “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and Miller treated those as two separate categories of citizenship carrying two separate bundles of rights. The Privileges or Immunities Clause, he held, protected only the narrow set of rights tied to national citizenship. Everything else, including the right to earn a living, own property, and enter contracts, belonged to state citizenship and stayed under state control.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
The national rights Miller listed were unusually thin: the right to travel to the seat of the federal government, access to federal seaports and offices, protection on the high seas or abroad, the right to peaceably assemble and petition, habeas corpus, use of navigable waters, and the right to run for federal office.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872) These almost never came up in ordinary disputes between citizens and their state governments.
Miller disposed of the other claims briefly. The Thirteenth Amendment, he wrote, applied only to actual slavery. And the Equal Protection Clause, in his reading, was limited to cases of race-based discrimination against Black Americans; he doubted it would ever apply elsewhere.4Constitution Center. The Slaughter-House Cases
Miller was open about what drove the narrow reading. Accepting the butchers’ interpretation, he wrote, would “transfer the security and protection of all civil rights” to the federal government and “bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States,” turning the Supreme Court into “a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States.”5Legal Information Institute. U.S. Constitution Annotated – Amdt14.S1.2.1 Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases The majority insisted that the “one pervading purpose” of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments was “the freedom of the slave race,” not a wholesale restructuring of federalism.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
The Dissent
Four justices dissented, and their opinions are widely regarded as closer to what the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters actually intended. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and Justices Field, Bradley, and Swayne joined or wrote separate dissents.
Justice Stephen Field called the majority’s reading an interpretation that turned the amendment into “a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing.” He argued that the amendment was meant to protect fundamental freedoms, including the right to pursue a lawful occupation, not just the handful of obscure federal privileges Miller had identified.3Constitution Annotated. Amdt14.S1.2.1 Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases
Justice Joseph Bradley pressed harder. He asked whether pursuing a lawful trade was a right of national citizenship, and whether handing one company exclusive control over nearly 1,200 square miles was a “reasonable regulation” of that trade. His answer to both was no. Bradley also disputed the majority’s claim that the amendment was only about formerly enslaved people. They may have been “the primary cause of the amendment,” he wrote, but “its language is general, embracing all citizens, and I think it was purposely so expressed.”1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
What the Ruling Did to Civil Rights
The majority said the Fourteenth Amendment’s central purpose was to protect formerly enslaved people. The decision made that protection much harder to enforce. By emptying the Privileges or Immunities Clause of substantive content, the Court removed the most direct textual basis for federal protection of civil rights against hostile state governments.4Constitution Center. The Slaughter-House Cases
The consequences ran through the decades that followed. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Court used similar reasoning to limit Fourteenth Amendment protections to state action alone, shielding private violence against Black citizens from federal prosecution. The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 struck down key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the same logic. Together, these decisions dismantled the legal framework of Reconstruction and left Black Americans largely at the mercy of state governments for generations.
The Privileges or Immunities Clause itself became what legal scholars call a “dead letter.” Lower courts remain bound by the 1873 precedent, and reviving the clause would require the Supreme Court to overturn Slaughter-House outright.
How Constitutional Law Worked Around the Decision
Because the Privileges or Immunities Clause was effectively closed off, lawyers and courts turned to another part of the same amendment: the Due Process Clause. Over time they built the doctrine of “substantive due process,” treating “due process” not just as a guarantee of fair procedures but as a source of fundamental substantive rights.
Through that clause the Supreme Court eventually “incorporated” most of the Bill of Rights against state governments, one right at a time. Freedom of speech, the right to counsel, protection against unreasonable searches, and the right to bear arms all reached the states through the Due Process Clause rather than the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The workaround produced results, but it forces the Due Process Clause to carry work its text does not obviously support, and several justices have said so.
In Timbs v. Indiana (2019), Justice Gorsuch wrote in a concurrence that “the appropriate vehicle for incorporation may well be the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, rather than, as this Court has long assumed, the Due Process Clause.” Justice Thomas went further, arguing that the Court should abandon the due process route entirely and recognize the Privileges or Immunities Clause as the proper source of incorporated rights. Neither view has commanded a majority.
Is Slaughter-House Still Good Law?
Yes. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court was directly asked to overrule Slaughter-House and use the Privileges or Immunities Clause to apply the Second Amendment to state and local governments. The majority declined and stayed with the Due Process Clause route.6Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring alone, wrote that he would have overruled the 1873 decision and treated the Privileges or Immunities Clause as the correct path for applying the Bill of Rights to the states.
Five justices in 1873 feared that a broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment would destroy state sovereignty, so they chose the narrowest interpretation available. The dissenters warned that the ruling would leave fundamental rights unprotected, and the century that followed proved them largely right. The constitutional structure that eventually filled the gap works, but it remains an awkward substitute for what the amendment’s text appears to offer directly. Whether the Court will ever revisit the decision is one of the oldest open questions in American constitutional law.