14 apr 1873 anni - Slaughterhouse cases
Descrizione:
A Supreme Court decision determining that the "Privileges and Immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment only applied to federal citizenship and the rights associated with it. The decision arose from several Supreme Court cases involving slaughterhouses.
In 1860s New Orleans, entrails from butchered animals were tossed into the Mississippi River, contaminating the city's drinking water. In response, Louisiana passed a law Creating a New Orleans-based corporation, the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, which would gather all slaughterhouses in the city around the South and away from the Mississippi. All slaughterhouses had to work under Crescent City, granting the company a monopoly in the city.
Several lawsuits by the Butchers' Benevolent Association were fruitless, as the courts all ruled in favor of Crescent City. A few cases were then appealed to the Supreme Court. The butchers argued that Crescent City violated their rights under the 14th Amendment. This had originally been intended to grant citizenship to newly-emancipated blacks during Reconstruction, but no specification of race was included in the wording of the amendment, meaning that it technically applied to all US citizens. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment was only to apply to former slaves, and anyway it only pertained to rights granted by national citizenship, not state. Therefore, the butchers' rights were not infringed.
Crescent City would last until 1879, when the Louisiana government dissolved it. The decision was significant because it significantly limited the reach of the 14th Amendment.
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