Civil+Rights+Cases

=The Civil Rights Cases= 109 U.S. 3 (1883)

These consolidated cases considered the breadth of Congress's power to regulate private action under the Reconstruction Amendments. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 contained sweeping language banning discrimination in virtually all public places. This ban extended to privately run hotels, restaurants, transportation, and other public accommodations.

The Court considered Congress's power under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments separately. The Thirteenth Amendment must empower Congress to regulate certain private action; abolishing slavery meant limiting the property rights of private slave owners. However, Congressional power is given only in the amount necessary to prohibit //slavery//, not //discrimination// in its many forms. This reasoning has been eclipsed by later cases, holding that Thirteenth Amendment power may extend to statutes against discrimination.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court declared that Congress's power only extends to governmental action, and that it may not regulate private behavior. This is still good law, and it has been enshrined as the "state action" doctrine. The Amendment "does not authorize Congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights; but to provide modes of redress against the operation of State laws, and the actions of State officers."

Because Congress's power to regulate private action under the Reconstruction Amendments was thus limited, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was stricken as an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional power.

Famously, the Court articulated a sentiment common at that time, as Reconstruction drew to a close:

"When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the //special favorite of the laws//, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected."