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

1. There is an extraordinary statement in the majority opinion of Justice Miller.  He writes: "No questions so far-reaching and pervading in their consequences, so profoundly interesting to the people of this country, and so important in their bearing upon the relations of the United States, of the several States to each other, and to the citizens of the States and of the United States, have been before this court during the official life of any of its present members. We have given every opportunity for a full hearing at the bar; we have discussed it freely and compared views among ourselves; we have taken ample time for careful deliberation, and we now propose to announce the judgments which we have formed in the construction of those articles, so far as we have found them necessary to the decision of the cases before us, and beyond that, we have neither the inclination nor the right to go."

Do you remember any other case you have read in Constitutional Law where there was such a frank statement as to the importance of the decision.  Why do you think the majority felt this case was so important. (Your professor believes the Justice was absolutely correct and that Slaughterhouse is one of the 5 most important decisions ever made by the Court).

Do you think the majority was faithful to its claim that it would only go so far as "necessary to the decision of the cases before us"?

2. The butchers were represented at the Supreme Court by John Archibald Campbell, a very interesting individual. Mr. Campbell was himself a former Supreme Court justice who had been enlisted to try to broker peace between the North and South prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, failed in that effort, and then quit the Court when violence at Fort Sumter marked the beginning of the Civil War. Notice that Campbell's position here for an expansive interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments would potentially enable federal authority to restrain Southern oppression of the former slaves.

3. Notice that the majority is sensitive to the charge that it has read the Reconstruction amendments into nothingness. Justice Field's dissent says it has rendered those amendments "a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing." It then lists, it what is probably dicta, the rights that are protected by the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment. Although some of the rights are precisely those unlikely to be a subject of state oppression such as protection on the high seas, at the end of his passage he lists some rights which might be quite central, notably freedom of assembly, a right found in the first amendment of the Constitution. What are the implications of this dictum? When you read the majority opinion in Cruikshank, what happens to the idea that the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment protects citizens from at least some of the protections contained in the bill of rights against state oppression?