Butchers' Benevolent Ass'n v. Crescent City Live-Stock Landing & Slaughter-House Co.

Majority reasoning

The majority, led by Justice Miller, reasoned that the Fourteenth Amendment's history shows it was adopted primarily to secure the freedom and citizenship of formerly enslaved people, and its provisions must be read in that light. The Court held that the Amendment created a distinction between state and national citizenship, and the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only privileges of national citizenship (such as access to federal government, use of navigable waters, and protection abroad), not the broad common-law rights like the right to pursue a trade, which remain privileges of state citizenship protected only by state law. Adopting the plaintiffs' broader reading, the Court warned, would transfer control over nearly all civil rights from the states to the federal government and make the Supreme Court "a perpetual censor" over state legislation, a result Congress could not have intended. The Court found the law a legitimate police power regulation of a public health nuisance (slaughterhouses), noting it did not actually stop butchers from working, only required them to use the company's facilities for a fee. The majority also rejected the Due Process and Equal Protection claims, finding the restriction was not a "deprivation of property" and that Equal Protection was intended mainly to address racial discrimination against Black citizens, which was not present here.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Field, joined by the Chief Justice, Swayne, and Bradley, argued that the majority's narrow reading of "privileges and immunities" made the clause meaningless, since it would only protect rights already secure under the Constitution's supremacy, requiring no new amendment. He argued the fundamental right to pursue a lawful trade or calling free from arbitrary restraint is one of the privileges of American citizenship, tracing this to English common-law hostility toward monopolies and the Declaration of Independence's protection of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Field found the monopoly was not a genuine police regulation because the sanitary aims could be achieved without excluding all other butchers from an area of over 1,100 square miles, and he compared the restrictions to oppressive pre-revolutionary French feudal privileges. Justice Bradley, also dissenting, added that the right to choose one's calling is inherent in liberty itself, protected by Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, and that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to give federal courts power to enforce these fundamental rights against state infringement, rejecting fears that this would flood federal courts or destroy state governance. Justice Swayne, dissenting, argued that the Amendment's text was plain and unambiguous, applying to all citizens without limitation to race, and that the majority's narrow construction defeated the framers' intent to provide robust federal protection against state oppression, turning "what was meant for bread into a stone."