Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-house Co.

U.S. Case Law

popularly The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), limited the protections provided by the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibits states from denying any person “the equal protection of the law”). Specifically the Supreme Court ruled that a state-sanctioned slaughtering monopoly did not abridge other slaughterhouse owners' privileges and immunities as U.S. citizens and deprive them of property rights, as they had claimed. The Court thereby refused to extend federal protection of civil rights to the property rights of businesspersons, but in so doing it unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks and other minorities.