The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) was the first time that the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the meaning of the new 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1869 the Louisiana Legislature passed an Act which mandated that all slaughtering in metro New Orleans must be done at a single slaughterhouse, and created a monopoly corporation to run it. All butchers had use it, and had to pay a fee to slaughter there. The butchers brought suit against this monopoly, which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the court held that the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to national citizenship, not to state citizenship. Constitutional scholars, both then and now, dispute this.
No argument, especially one that reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, arises in a vacuum, yet most lawyers and law students who read and study the case know little about the city in which it began. This LibGuide focuses on the New Orleans of that period, and not on the legal reasoning of the case.
