Quotes About Slaughter-House Cases

For almost a century after the Slaughter-House Cases, the Court followed this narrow reading of the Equal Protection Clause and refused to use it to stop other types of discrimination. For example, in 1875, two years after the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court held that it was constitutional to deny women the right to vote.

A new era, however, began toward the end of Reconstruction when the US Supreme Court's ruling in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) gave state legislatures the authority to determine what actions constituted violations of a person's civil rights. The

In February 1873, the US Supreme Court heard the appeal of a group of cases from Louisiana consolidated as the Slaughter-House Cases (1873). The Court's ruling reversed the liberal direction that the nation was moving in, that is, toward equalizing the political rights of all citizens. The justices ruled that state legislatures had the power to determine what social practices in everyday life constituted discriminatory actions and violated a person's constitutional rights.