Slaughter-House Cases

Summary

In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees. Defenders of the act pointed to the offal that butchers had long thrown into the Mississippi above the city's water supply. The Butchers' Benevolent Association sued, and after the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the law, several consolidated cases reached Washington. Their counsel, former Justice John A. Campbell, argued that the monopoly imposed an involuntary servitude forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment and violated the new Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, by abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, depriving them of property without due process, and denying equal protection. Louisiana answered that the law was an ordinary exercise of the police power over public health, of a kind states had always used, and that the butchers could still practice their trade at the company's facility. On 14 April 1873 the Court upheld the law, five to four. Justice Miller, in the first full interpretation of the postwar amendments, found in all three one pervading purpose: securing the freedom of the formerly enslaved and protecting them from those who had held them. The Fourteenth Amendment distinguished national citizenship from state citizenship, he reasoned, and its Privileges or Immunities Clause protected only rights owing their existence to the national government, such as access to the seat of government, protection on the high seas and use of navigable waters. To read it as placing all civil rights under federal protection would make the Court a perpetual censor of state legislation and change the whole federal system, which Miller would not presume without plain language. The restraint on the butchers was not a deprivation of property, and the Equal Protection Clause was aimed at discrimination against freedmen as a class. Justice Field, joined by Chase, Swayne and Bradley, argued that the amendment protects the common rights of free citizens, including the right to pursue a lawful calling, against state abridgment, and that the health rationale did not justify a monopoly. Justice Bradley added that the choice of an occupation is both liberty and property. The library text contains Miller's opinion and excerpts from the Field and Bradley dissents; Swayne's dissent and the footnotes are absent. The decision left the Privileges or Immunities Clause with little independent force. The arguments of Field and Bradley were later developed under the Due Process Clause, notably in Lochner v. New York (1905). Louisiana's 1879 constitution ended the monopoly, and in Saenz v. Roe (1999) the Court relied on the clause to protect a right of newly arrived residents to equal treatment.

Top Lessons

• Reading new amendments by their purpose

  Miller interpreted the Reconstruction amendments through the history that produced them, concluding that their central aim was the freedom and protection of the formerly enslaved. His approach shows how a single dominant purpose can shape, and also limit, the reading of broad constitutional words.

• The federal balance

  Miller feared that a broad reading would make the Court a perpetual censor of state laws and transform the relation between states and nation. The dissenters believed the amendments had deliberately made that change. Both sides argued about the structure of the Union as much as about butchers.

• Health law and economic liberty

  Louisiana defended its act as sanitary regulation; Field replied that only two provisions concerned health and the rest created a monopoly. The case asks how courts should judge a law whose stated purpose and practical effect seem to diverge.

• The right to work at a trade

  Field and Bradley placed the freedom to follow a lawful calling among the most valuable rights of a free citizen, tracing it to English opposition to monopolies. That idea, rejected here, later shaped decades of constitutional argument about economic regulation.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Louisiana statute was framed as a sanitary measure for a city troubled by epidemics, and the opinions debate how far a state's power over public health justifies concentrating slaughtering below the water supply; the discussion is legal rather than medical.