itizen of
the United States.[12]

Privileges and Immunities

PURPOSE AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE CLAUSE

Unique among constitutional provisions, the privileges and immunities
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enjoys the distinction of having been
rendered a "practical nullity" by a single decision of the Supreme Court
rendered within five years after its ratification. In the
Slaughter-House Cases[13] a bare majority of the Court frustrated the
aims of the most aggressive sponsors of this clause, to whom was
attributed an intention to centralize "in the hands of the Federal
Government large powers hitherto exercised by the States" with a view to
enabling business to develop unimpeded by State interference. This
expansive alteration of the Federal System was to have been achieved by
converting the rights of the citizens of each State as of the date of
the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment into privileges and immunities
of United States citizenship and thereafter perpetuating this newly
defined _status quo_ through judicial condemnation of any State law
challenged as "abridging" any one of the latter privileges. To have
fostered such intentions, the Court declared, would have been "to
transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights * * * to
the Federal Government, * * * to bring within the power of Congress the
entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the
States," and to "constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all
legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens,
with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with
those rights, as they existed at the time of the adoption of this
amendment * * * [The effect of] so great a departure from the structure
and spirit of our institutions; * * * is to fetter and degrade the State
governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress, in the
exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most
ordinary and fundamental character; * * * We are convinced that no such
results were intended by the Congress * * *, nor by the legislatures
* * * which ratified" this amendment, and that the sole "pervading
purpose" of this and the other War Amendments was "the freedom of the
slave race."

Conformably to these conclusions the Court advised the New Orleans
butchers that the Louisiana statute conferring on a single corporation a
monopoly of the business of slaughtering cattle abr