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Rescuing The Fourteenth Amendment Privileges Or Immunities Clause: How “Attrition Of Parliamentary Processes” Begat Accidental Ambiguity; How Ambiguity Begat Slaughterhouse, Michael Anthony Lawrence
Rescuing The Fourteenth Amendment Privileges Or Immunities Clause: How “Attrition Of Parliamentary Processes” Begat Accidental Ambiguity; How Ambiguity Begat Slaughterhouse, Michael Anthony Lawrence
Michael Anthony Lawrence
This essay addresses a topic of great academic and practical interest currently facing the Supreme Court: whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which has lain dormant since the Court’s erroneous 1873 SlaughterHouse Cases decision, should be resurrected in order to apply the Second Amendment to the States.
The essay makes the unique argument that the textual basis for the SlaughterHouse Court’s holding regarding the clause - i.e., the lack of parallel textual construction in the Fourteenth Amendment Section One’s first two sentences regarding citizenship - was in fact the wholly unintentional product of what we might call “attrition of parliamentary …