Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 696

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Unit: $U54

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 598 (2000)

621

Opinion of the Court

not concentrate power in the general government for any
purpose of police government within the States’ ”) (quoting
T. Cooley, Constitutional Limitations 294, n. 1 (2d ed. 1871)).
Foremost among these limitations is the time-honored princi-
ple that the Fourteenth Amendment, by its very terms, pro-
“[T]he principle has become ﬁrmly
hibits only state action.
embedded in our constitutional law that the action inhibited
by the ﬁrst section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only
such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States.
That Amendment erects no shield against merely private
conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.” Shelley v.
Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, 13, and n. 12 (1948).

Shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, we
decided two cases interpreting the Amendment’s provisions,
United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883), and the Civil
Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1883).
In Harris, the Court con-
sidered a challenge to § 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871.
That section sought to punish “private persons” for “con-
spiring to deprive any one of the equal protection of the
laws enacted by the State.”
106 U. S., at 639. We con-
cluded that this law exceeded Congress’ § 5 power because
the law was “directed exclusively against the action of pri-
vate persons, without reference to the laws of the State, or
their administration by her ofﬁcers.”
In so
doing, we reemphasized our statement from Virginia v.
Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880), that “ ‘these provisions of
the fourteenth amendment have reference to State action
exclusively, and not to any action of private individuals.’ ”
Harris, supra, at 639 (misquotation in Harris).

Id., at 640.

We reached a similar conclusion in the Civil Rights Cases.
In those consolidated cases, we held that the public accom-
modation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which
applied to purely private conduct, were beyond the scope
of the § 5 enforcement power. 109 U. S., at 11 (“Individual
invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of
the [Fourteenth] [A]mendment”). See also, e. g., Romer v.