Reflections on Samuel F. Miller and the Slaughter-House Cases: Still a Meaty Subject
At the outset, a confession is appropriate. When the editors of this journal invited me to prepare an article for it, I recalled the piquant comments by the late Yale Law professor Fred Rodell. “There are,” he wrote, “two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” Even worse was his finding that “the average law review writer is peculiarly able to say nothing with an air of great importance.” It is thus with some real trepidation that I offer these reflections on a most famous and still very controversial decision, the Slaughter-House Cases, decided in 1873. Hopefully, Rodell’s conclusions will not apply to what follows.
Until quite recently, time has not been good to this Supreme Court decision, described by its author, Justice Samuel F. Miller, as “the best and most beneficial public act of a man’s life.” Typical is the comment by another late Yale Law Professor, Charles Black, who labeled Miller’s opinion as “probably the worst holding, in its effect on human rights, ever uttered by the Supreme Court.” Finally, Lawrence Tribe, in an extended review of Black’s book, concluded that “there is considerable consensus among constitutional thinkers that the Supreme Court made a scandalously wrong decision in this case.” Certainly there are many students of the case who would concur with Tribe. A vast plethora of commentary on Slaughter-House, much of it negative, has appeared since 1873.
