Opinion ID: 538815
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fourteenth Amendment Privileges and Immunities Clause.

Text: 33 In The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873), the Court made clear that the Fourteenth Amendment did not incorporate the substantive rights deemed fundamental by Justice Washington in Corfield. 34 [With few, textually grounded exceptions,] the entire domain of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the States [as defined in Corfield ] lay within the constitutional and legislative power of the States, and without that of the Federal government. Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government? And where it is declared that Congress shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the states? 35 .... 36 We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them. 37 [T]he privileges and immunities relied on ... are those which belong to citizens of the States as such, and ... are left to the State governments for security and protection, and not by this article placed under the special care of the Federal government.... 38 Id. at 77-78 (emphasis in original). Moreover, the Court made clear that the only rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges and Immunities Clause are those which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws. Id. at 79. 39 In a series of late nineteenth century cases, the Court recognized several unenumerated rights it deemed essential attribute[s] of national citizenship. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 552, 23 L.Ed. 588 (1876). 20 Even though the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges and Immunities Clause on its face protects such rights against state infringement, the Court has always viewed the rights themselves as arising independently of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed the doctrine that certain unenumerated rights are implicit in the concept of national citizenship antedated the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. 21 Even after its passage, however, this case line refused to subsume national citizenship rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, holding instead that they do[ ] not depend upon any of the amendments to the Constitution, but arise[ ] out of the creation and establishment of the Constitution itself of a national government. In re Quarles, 158 U.S. 532, 536, 15 S.Ct. 959, 961, 39 L.Ed. 1080 (1895). 40 At first blush, insisting that the rights of national citizenship are protected, but not created, by the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges and Immunities Clause may seem like a quibble, but the distinction has critical doctrinal ramifications in other contexts. For example, rights created by the Fourteenth Amendment itself can be infringed only by state actors, while the rights of national citizenship recognized in this case line may be infringed by purely private actors as well. See Guest, 383 U.S. at 759 n. 17, 86 S.Ct. at 1178 n. 17; id. at 771-73, 86 S.Ct. at 1185-86 (Harlan, J., dissenting). 22 41 As the Court grew increasingly willing to discover unenumerated rights within the Fourteenth Amendment itself in the decades following Slaughter-House, it relied exclusively on the Due Process Clause. 23 Plaintiffs therefore cannot rely on the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges and Immunities Clause, which has remained essentially moribund since Slaughter-House, as the source of an implied fundamental right of intrastate travel. 42