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The Slaughter-House Cases, , was the first United States Supreme Court interpretation of the recently-enacted Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It was a pivotal case in early civil rights law, reading the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting the "privileges or immunities" conferred by virtue of Federal, United States citizenship, to all individuals of all states within it; but not to protect the various privileges or immunities incident to citizenship of a state. However, Federal rights of citizenship were at that time few (such as the right to travel between states and to use navigable rivers); the 14th Amendment did not protect the far broader range of rights covered by state citizenship. In effect, the 14th Amendment was interpreted to convey limited protection pertinent to a small minority of rights. The decision consolidated three similar cases: * ''The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company'' * ''Paul Esteben, L. Ruch, J. P. Rouede, W. Maylie, S. Firmberg, B. Beaubay, William Fagan, J. D. Broderick, N. Seibel, M. Lannes, J. Gitzinger, J. P. Aycock, D. Verges, The Live-Stock Dealers' and Butchers' Association of New Orleans, and Charles Cavaroc v. The State of Louisiana, ex rel. S. Belden, Attorney-General'' * ''The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company'' ==History and legal dispute== As one resident put it, New Orleans in the mid-19th century was plagued by "intestines and portions of putrefied animal matter lodged (the drinking pipes )" coming from local slaughterhouses whenever the tide from the Mississippi river was low. A mile and a half upstream from the city, a thousand butchers gutted over 300,000 animals per year.〔 Animal entrails (known as offal), dung, blood, and urine were a part of New Orleans' drinking water, which was implicated in cholera outbreaks among the population. Between 1832 and 1869, the city of New Orleans suffered eleven cholera outbreaks.〔 In response, a New Orleans grand jury recommended that the slaughterhouses be moved south, but since many of the slaughterhouses were outside city limits, the grand jury's recommendations carried no weight. The city then appealed to the state legislature. As a result, in 1869, the Louisiana legislature passed "An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans, to Locate the Stock Landings and Slaughter Houses, and to incorporate the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-House Company", a law that allowed the city of New Orleans to create a corporation that centralized all slaughterhouse operations in the city.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Slaughterhouse Cases )〕 At the time, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia all had similar provisions to confine butchers to areas that kept offal from contaminating the water supply.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=H-Net Reviews )〕 The legislature chartered a private corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company to run a "Grand Slaughterhouse" at the southern part of the city opposite of the Mississippi River.〔 Crescent City was not to slaughter beef itself, but to act as a franchise corporation, renting out space to other butchers in the city for a fee under a designated maximum. In addition, the statute granted "sole and exclusive privilege of conducting and carrying on the livestock landing and slaughterhouse business within the limits and privilege granted by the act, and that all such animals shall be landed at the stock landings and slaughtered at the slaughterhouses of the company, and nowhere else. Penalties are enacted for infractions of this provision, and prices fixed for the maximum charges of the company for each steamboat and for each animal landed".〔 This exclusivity would last for a 25-year period. All other slaughterhouses would be closed up, forcing butchers to slaughter within the operation set up by Crescent City. The statute forbade Crescent City from favoring one butcher over another by promising harsh penalties for refusal to sell space to any butcher. All animals on the premises would be inspected by an officer appointed by the governor of the state. Over four hundred members of the Butchers' Benevolent Association joined together to sue to stop Crescent City's takeover of the slaughterhouse industry.〔 In the background of his majority opinion,〔 Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller reiterated the concerns of the butchers:
The lower courts found in favor of Crescent City in all cases. Six cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. The butchers based their claims on the due process, privileges or immunities and equal protection clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified by the states only five years before the decision in 1868. Their attorney, former Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell (who had retired due to his Confederate loyalties), was then involved in a number of cases in New Orleans designed to obstruct Radical Reconstruction. Although the 14th Amendment was passed in part to protect newly freed slaves in the South, the language of Section 1 is not racially limited. Campbell was therefore able to argue for a new, broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that would allow butchers of any race to "sustain their lives through labor." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Slaughter-House Cases」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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