Slaughterhouse Cases
| Slaughter-House Cases | |
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| Argued January 11, 1872 Reargued February 3–5, 1873 Decided April 14, 1873 |
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| Full case name | The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company; Paul Esteben, L. Ruch, J. P. Rouede, W. Maylie, S. Firmberg, B. Beaubay, William Fagan, J. D. Broderick, N. Seibel, M. Lannes, J. Gitzinger, J. P. Aycock, D. Verges, The Live-Stock Dealers' and Butchers' Association of New Orleans, and Charles Cavaroc v. The State of Louisiana, ex rel. S. Belden, Attorney-General; The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company |
| Citations | 83 U.S. 36 (more)
83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36; 21 L. Ed. 394; 1872 U.S. LEXIS 1139
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| Prior history | Error to the Supreme Court of Louisiana |
| Holding | |
| The Fourteenth Amendment protects the privileges and immunities of citizenship of the United States, not privileges and immunities of citizenship of a state. | |
| Court membership | |
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| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Miller, joined by Clifford, Strong, Hunt, Davis |
| Dissent | Field, joined by Chase, Swayne, Bradley |
| Dissent | Bradley |
| Dissent | Swayne |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. Art. IV. sec. 2, 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments | |
The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), was the first United States Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment which had recently been enacted. It was a pivotal case in early civil rights law and held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the privileges or immunities of citizenship of the United States, not privileges and immunities of citizenship of a state. However, federal rights of citizenship were then few, such as the right to travel between states and to use navigable rivers; the amendment did not protect the far broader range of rights covered by state citizenship. In effect, the amendment was interpreted to convey limited protection pertinent to a small minority of rights.
The decision consolidated three similar cases:
As one resident put it, New Orleans, in the mid-nineteenth century, was plagued by "intestines and portions of putrefied animal matter lodged [around the drinking pipes]" coming from local slaughterhouses whenever the tide from the Mississippi River was low. A mile and a half upstream from the city, 1000 butchers gutted over 300,000 animals per year. Animal entrails (known as offal), dung, blood, and urine were a part of New Orleans's drinking water, which was implicated in cholera outbreaks among the population.
In response, 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 then 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 that kept offal from contaminating the water supply.
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