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A Reinterpretation of the Slaughter-House Cases Article Setting Incorporationism Straight: A Reinterpretation of the Slaughter-House Cases Kevin Christopher Newsomt CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 645 II. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE CASES: THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ........ 650 A . The Facts...................................................................................... 651 B. Justice Miller's Majority Opinion................................................ 651 C . The Dissents ................................................................................. 656 Ell. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE CASES: A SECOND LOOK ............................. 658 A. The Butchers' Claims and the Dissenters' Response: A "Radical" View of the Fourteenth Amendment ........................ 658 B. Justice Miller's Majority Opinion: A "Compromise" View of the FourteenthAmendment ...................................................... 666 1. Which Rights Renained Subject to State Definition and Control? ................................................................................. 668 a. "Civil Rights". ................................................................ 670 b. Corfield Rights ................................................................ 673 2. Which Rights Were Transferred by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Government? .............................. 675 - Associate, Covington & Burling, Washington, D.C. Special thanks to Laurence Tribe, Richard Fallon, and Jon Cohn for reviewing earlier drafts of this Article, and to Akhil Amar for discussing with me some of the ideas contained in the piece. Even more special thanks to my best friend and loving wife, Debbie, who has for five and a half years been a constant source of support and encouragement. The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 109: 643 a. Generally: Rights That "Owe Their Existence" to the Constitution ..................................................................... 675 b. Specifically: Miller's List of Federal Privilegesand Im m unities....................................................................... 677 3. Why Did Miller Emphasize the FourteenthAmendment's Relationship to the Recently Freed Slaves? ........................... 683 4. Second Look: A Summary ...................................................... 686 IV. THE BIGGER PICTURE ......................................................................... 687 A. Justice Miller's JurisprudentialPhilosophy ................................ 688 1. Preserving the Federal-StateBalance ................................... 688 2. Observing JudicialRestraint and Honoring Original Intent ...................................................................................... 692 a. Judicial Restraint ............................................................ 693 b. OriginalIntent ................................................................. 696 3. Resisting the Flooding of the Courts ..................................... 703 4. Opposing Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism........................... 705 5. Slaughter-House and Justice Miller's Jurisprudence: A Sum m ary............................................................................. 706 B. Justice Miller's Voting Record..................................................... 708 1. Cruikshank: The Two Rights of Assembly and the Problem of "State Action". .................................................................. 712 a. A n O verview .................................................................... 7 13 b. A n A nalysis ...................................................................... 7 14 i. The Two Rights of Assembly ..................................... 714 ii. The Problem of "State Action .....................717 2. Twitchell, Eilenbecker, and Hurtado: Cases in Which No Argument Under the Privilegesor Immunities Clause W as R aised ............................................................................ 72 1 a. Cases Involving the Direct Application of the Bill of Rights to the States .......................................................... 721 b. Cases Involving the Due Process Clause Alone .............. 723 3. Edwards and Sauvinet: Cases Involving the Right to Civil Jury Trial ...................................................................... 727 4. Miller's Voting Record: A Summary ..................................... 732 V. GOING FORWARD: THE IMPLICATIONS OF REINTERPRETING SLA UGHTER-HOUSE ............................................................................. 733 2000] Setting Incorporationism Straight In 1873, in the Slaughter-House Cases... the Supreme Court said the phrase "privileges and immunities" had nothing to do with applying the Bill of Rights to the states. The vote was a narrow 5-4--one vote switch might have changed the course of history.' I. INTRODUCTION The Supreme Court's decision last Term in Saenz v. Roe' was, at once, both run-of-the-mill and quite remarkable. There is nothing particularly earthshaking about the result the Court reached-specifically, that California could not constitutionally limit welfare payments to a new resident during his first year in California to the amount provided by the state from which he had moved.3 What makes the decision in Saenz truly newsworthy-and potentially a watershed-is the way the Court arrived at the result that it did: For the first time in sixty-five years, and only the second time in history, the Court struck down a state statute on the ground that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Privileges or Immunities Clause provides that "[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States." 4 Prior to Saenz, the Supreme Court had relied on the Clause to invalidate a state statute only once, when, in the 1935 case of Colgate v. Harvey,' it invoked the Clause to set aside a state income tax charged against in-state residents on interest and dividend income earned outside the state. The Court's initial foray into the realm of federal "privileges [and] immunities" was short-lived. Colgate was overruled in 1940 by Madden v. Kentucky,6 and the Privileges or Immunities Clause has remained dormant ever since-at least until Saenz, that is. 1. Stephen J. Wermiel, Rights in the Modern Era: Applying the Bill of Rights to the States. I WM. & MARY BILL RTS. J. 121,124 (1992). 2. 119 S. Ct. 1518 (1999). 3. This is certainly not to say that the outcome in Saenz was foreordained. As Laurence Tribe recently pointed out, even the result in Saenz is "something of a mystery" in the following sense: In Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969), it took a "far more liberal Court" two rounds of argument to decide ultimately to invalidate a far more extreme California law-one that outright denied new residents access to welfare benefits during their first year in the state-and, even then. it struck down the statute only by a 6-3 margin. Laurence H. Tribe, Saenz Sans Prophecy: Does the Privilegesor Immunities Revival Portend the Future-orReveal the Structure of the Present?. 113 HARV. L. REV. 110, 113 (1999). In Saenz, by contrast, a relatively conservative Court invalidated a less burdensome California program by a comfortable 7-2 vote. See id. at 119. 4. U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1. 5. 296 U.S. 404 (1935). 6. 309 U.S. 83 (1940). The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 109: 643 So, does Saenz signal an out-and-out "Privileges or Immunities Revival" ?7 Only time will tell. At the very least, however, the decision seems to indicate a willingness on the part of the current Court to reconsider the role, if any, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause ought to play in modem constitutional law. Even Justice Thomas, dissenting in Saenz, acknowledged that he "would be open to reevaluating [the] meaning" of the Privileges or Immunities Clause "in an appropriate case." 8 But before any meaningful reconsideration of the Privileges or Immunities Clause's role can occur, the Court will have to grapple with several important issues, two of which Justice Thomas specifically identified. First, the Court should "endeavor to understand what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought [the Clause] meant." 9 Second, the Court will need to "consider whether the Clause should displace, rather than augment, portions of [modem] equal protection and substantive due process jurisprudence." "0There is, in addition, a third, and ultimately even more important, question the Court must address if it is serious about resuscitating the long-dormant Privileges or Immunities Clause: What about the Slaughter-House Cases?" In contemporary constitutional discourse, Slaughter-House stands for one simple truth: that the Privileges or Immunities Clause is utterly incapable of performing any real work in the protection of individual rights against state interference, and that any argument premised on the Clause is therefore a constitutional non-starter. Novice students of constitutional law, upon encountering the Privileges 'or Immunities Clause for the first time, are told by their professors (pausing ever so briefly in the headlong rush toward the real meat of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses): "Privileges or Immunities? Don't worry about it. Justice Miller and the Slaughter-House Court decimated that provision way back in 1873." Likewise, recent law-school graduates preparing for the bar examination are instructed that "Privileges or Immunities Clause" will never be
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