the slaughterhouse cases of 1873 are significant because the supreme court
Slaughter-House Cases The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873), was the first United States Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment which had recently been enacted. It was a pivotal case in early civil rights law and held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the privileges or immunities of citizenship of the United States, not privileges and immunities of citizenship of a state. However, as the federal rights of citizenship were then few, such as the right to travel between states and to use navigable rivers; the amendment did not protect the far broader range of rights covered by state citizenship. In effect, the amendment was interpreted to convey limited protection pertinent to a small minority of rights.
Plessy v. Ferguson Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896),[2] was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".[3] This legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the lone dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan.