Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1873

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

83 U.S. 36 | 21 L. Ed. 394 | 16 Wall. 36 | 1872 U.S. LEXIS 1139

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Takeaway

In short, this case gave the Privileges or Immunities Clause an extremely narrow reading, leaving most ordinary civil and economic rights under state rather than federal constitutional protection.

Background

Louisiana enacted a 1869 health measure directing that livestock intended for sale or slaughter around New Orleans be landed and slaughtered at facilities operated by the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company. The statute required the company to build adequate facilities, capped many of its charges, required it to allow any butcher to slaughter there, and imposed inspection requirements. But it also gave the company a 25-year exclusive privilege to operate stock landings and slaughterhouses in Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard Parishes.

New Orleans butchers and livestock dealers challenged the arrangement. They argued that the exclusive franchise effectively prevented them from practicing their trade except at the company's facilities and on the company's terms. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled for the company in the related cases. The challengers sought Supreme Court review, invoking the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the writs of error should be dismissed because some parties had agreed to settle the controversy and dismiss them.

Holding

No. The Court denied dismissal because the record did not show that every plaintiff in error was bound by the asserted settlement agreement.

Reasoning

Although the company produced affidavits and a written settlement agreement, the Court found no satisfactory evidence that the agreement bound all parties named in the writs of error. Some parties still before the Court had not consented to dismissal and retained a right to be heard.

Because the challengers had consistently claimed in the state litigation that the Louisiana statute violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Court had both jurisdiction and a duty to review the state judgments on those federal constitutional questions.

Issue #2

Whether Louisiana's exclusive slaughterhouse and livestock-landing franchise exceeded the State's general police power.

Holding

No. Regulating the location and conditions of slaughtering in a densely populated city was a valid exercise of Louisiana's police power, and the legislature could use an exclusive corporate franchise to carry out that regulatory program.

Reasoning

The Court treated slaughterhouses, stockyards, and animal inspection as classic subjects of state police power. Concentrated slaughtering and the landing of large numbers of animals could threaten public health, comfort, and safety, so Louisiana could require those activities to occur in designated places.

The statute did not wholly bar the butchers from their occupation. They could still slaughter, prepare, and sell their own meat; they were required only to use the company's facilities and pay regulated charges. The company, in turn, was required to provide sufficient facilities and to admit any person wishing to slaughter there.

The Court acknowledged that the wisdom of the monopoly could be debated. But it concluded that, absent a state or federal constitutional restriction, a legislature may create a corporation and grant it exclusive privileges when that is a means of performing a lawful public function.

Issue #3

Whether the Louisiana statute imposed involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Holding

No. The statute did not create the kind of personal servitude prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Thirteenth Amendment was adopted to abolish slavery and its related forms of compulsory personal service. Its language, particularly the term "involuntary," concerns servitude imposed on human beings, not ordinary economic regulation of a trade.

Requiring butchers to use a specified slaughterhouse did not compel them to labor for another person or reduce them to a condition comparable to slavery. The Court therefore found no need for extended analysis under the Thirteenth Amendment.

Issue #4

Whether the exclusive franchise abridged the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Holding

No. The right asserted by the butchers to pursue their occupation free from this regulation was not, in the Court's view, a privilege or immunity of national citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court read the Citizenship Clause as recognizing a distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a State. Because the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, it did not federalize the broad set of civil rights traditionally secured by state citizenship and state law.

The ordinary civil rights described in Corfield v. Coryell, including acquiring property and pursuing happiness subject to reasonable regulation, were understood as rights of state citizens. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, their principal protection lay with state governments, and the Court refused to read the Amendment as transferring their general protection to Congress and the federal courts.

The Court identified a narrow category of rights that arise from national citizenship, such as access to the federal government and its institutions, protection by the United States abroad, access to navigable waters, rights secured by federal treaties, and the right to become a citizen of another State through bona fide residence. The butchers' claimed right did not fall within that category.

A broader reading, the Court reasoned, would make Congress and the federal judiciary general supervisors of state legislation affecting civil rights. In the Court's view, neither the Amendment's language nor its historical setting clearly justified such a fundamental reallocation of authority from the States to the federal government.

Issue #5

Whether the statute deprived the butchers of property without due process of law or denied them the equal protection of the laws.

Holding

No. The regulation did not deprive the butchers of property within the meaning of due process, and it did not deny equal protection.

Reasoning

The Court concluded that a requirement that butchers slaughter at a designated place and pay for the facilities did not amount to a deprivation of property without due process of law. The law regulated the manner of carrying on a business rather than taking the butchers' property.

The Court understood the Equal Protection Clause principally in light of the post-Civil War oppression of newly freed Black people. It held that this case involved no discriminatory denial of legal protection comparable to the race-based laws the Amendment was designed to address.

The Court left open the possibility that equal protection might reach other forms of state oppression, but expressed substantial doubt that a state action not directed against Black people as a class or because of race would ordinarily fall within the clause.

Dissents

Justice Field

Reasoning

Justice Field, joined in this dissent by Chief Justice Chase and Justices Swayne and Bradley, agreed that Louisiana could regulate slaughtering for health purposes. But he distinguished a legitimate regulation requiring slaughterhouses to be located below the city and subject to inspection from the statute's separate grant of a 25-year exclusive commercial privilege to a favored corporation.

In his view, the monopoly did not serve a genuine sanitary purpose. Once the State established lawful health conditions, other butchers could comply with the same conditions. The exclusive grant instead took a lawful and necessary occupation from hundreds of people, forced them to pay tribute to the company, and conferred the benefit on a small group of private individuals.

Field read the Privileges or Immunities Clause to protect fundamental rights of national citizenship, including the right to pursue a lawful occupation and acquire property through honest labor. He relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Corfield v. Coryell, common-law hostility to monopolies, and the Declaration of Independence's protection of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The majority's narrow construction, Field argued, made the Privileges or Immunities Clause nearly useless. The Clause was meant to place the basic civil rights of American citizens under national protection against oppressive state legislation, including legislation that creates monopolies and denies citizens equal freedom to pursue ordinary callings.

Justice Bradley

Reasoning

Justice Bradley agreed with Field but separately emphasized that national citizenship is primary under the Fourteenth Amendment and that state citizenship follows from national citizenship plus residence. A citizen of the United States, he reasoned, must be able to claim equal fundamental rights in every State rather than depend on a State's grace.

The right to choose and pursue a lawful occupation, subject to valid and equal regulations, was for Bradley an essential component of liberty and a fundamental privilege of citizenship. A person's calling was also a form of property because it was the means by which the person made a living and acquired other property.

Bradley regarded the location and inspection provisions as valid health regulations, but regarded the exclusive franchise as arbitrary and unrelated to public health. Compelling all butchers in a vast area to use one private company's slaughterhouse and pay its toll was an unreasonable monopoly, not a police regulation.

He also rejected the claim that protecting these rights would destroy state authority. The Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only state invasions of fundamental rights; ordinary local legislation and the great body of state law would remain with the States.

Justice Swayne

Reasoning

Justice Swayne joined the dissents of Field and Bradley and stressed that the Reconstruction Amendments marked a decisive constitutional change. Unlike the original Bill of Rights, which chiefly limited the federal government, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments directly limited the States and gave the nation a new responsibility to protect individual rights.

He understood the Fourteenth Amendment's references to citizens of the United States and to any person as deliberately broad. Its protections were not limited to Black citizens, even though the oppression of formerly enslaved people was a central reason for its adoption.

For Swayne, liberty included freedom from unjust restraints, property included labor and the ability to make labor productive, and equal protection required legal equality in the protection of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The slaughterhouse monopoly plainly invaded all of those interests by benefiting a few at the expense of many.

He concluded that the majority improperly added a racial limitation not found in the Amendment's text and thereby defeated the national protection the Amendment was designed to provide against oppressive state legislation.