Teleforum

A new petition for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court presents an invaluable opportunity for the Court to revisit the Privileges or Immunities Clause. And it is unlike any opportunity in recent memory. First, it presents a question upon which every theory of the Fourteenth Amendment agrees: Does the Amendment protect a citizen against rights violations perpetrated by that citizen’s own state? The text and history of the provision, as well as Supreme Court precedent, unequivocally say “Yes,” but the lower courts have fundamentally misunderstood the Clause and rendered it impotent against one’s own state. Second, unlike most Privileges or Immunities cases, this case does not ask the Court to overrule the Slaughter-House Cases. Instead it asks for judicial protection of a right expressly recognized in Slaughter-House: the right to use the navigable waters of the United States, a right that was critically important to the freedmen at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratificat