By Petula Dvorak · The Washington Post (c) 2025
When the tide in the Mississippi fell, animal guts, blood, entrails and intestines tossed into the river from slaughterhouses upstream lodged around the pipes going into the New Orleans city reservoir.
In 1867, more than 3,000 people died of cholera in the Crescent City, as putrefied offal infected its drinking water.
It was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution – known as the birthright amendment and intended to provide citizenship and equal rights protection to people recently freed from slavery – that would help change the slaughterhouse situation in New Orleans and end the city’s cholera epidemic.
“The Fourteenth Amendment has been, without a doubt, the most dynamic part of the United States Constitution since the Civil War,” said Michael P. Zuckert, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
The amendment’s application had been a little like an accordion, with its first set of uses very narrow. “But once it started to broaden, everything becomes part of the 14th Amendment,” Zuckert said.
While the 14th Amendment was intended to correct the moral wrongs of slavery, it has been repurposed and reinterpreted over the past 157 years in cases involving American workdays, schools, train cars, interracial marriages, birth control and even the possession of pornography.
President Donald Trump’s executive order – “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” – argues that the “Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born in the United States,” and he cites it to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants who are in the United States without documentation. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a two-week restraining order blocking the Trump administration from moving forward on the order.
Here are eight cases that show the breadth of the 14th Amendment:
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The Slaughterhouse Cases, 1873
The Louisiana legislature created a corporation in March 1869 regulating the butchers that polluted the waters of New Orleans with the entrails, blood and urine – the “nuisance” – of thousands of animals every year.
The state restricted where the slaughterhouses could operate, creating a single area downriver from the city.
The Butchers’ Benevolent Association of New Orleans sued the state, arguing that the 14th Amendment protected their right to “sustain their lives through labor.”
The Supreme Court, which heard several slaughterhouse cases, didn’t buy it. In the decision siding with the state, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller underscored the true intent of the amendment to the butchers, writing that “we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
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Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
Homer Adolph Plessy, who was seven-eighths White and one-eighth African American, bought a first-class train ticket from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, and sat in the Whites-only car, according to an October 1892 story in the Times of New Orleans. When he was asked to move to the car for African Americans, he refused and was arrested.
Plessy was the perfect test case of the state’s Separate Car Act of 1890 because of Plessy’s mixed-race heritage. The Supreme Court ruled against him, with Justice Henry Billings Brown arguing that the 14th Amendment ensures legal, but not social, equality.
“Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power,” Brown wrote.
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Lochner v. New York, April 1905
Joseph Lochner was a baker in Utica, New York, in 1905 when he did something that affects the American workforce and labor law to this day: He let an employee work overtime.
That was a violation of the New York Bakeshop Act of 1895, which limited a baker’s workweek to 60 hours. Lochner was fined $50 and sued, eventually winning in the U.S. Supreme Court based on the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.
“The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment,” wrote Justice Rufus W. Peckham, adding that “no State can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
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Powell v. Alabama, 1932
The case began with a rumble on a freight train chugging toward Memphis involving a mix of Black and White youths who were “hoboing,” a common way for poor people to travel as they looked for work during the Great Depression.
Eventually, the White youths ditched the train, and nine Black teens were arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama, where they had to be protected by the National Guard from a lynch mob. Two young women were also on the train and said they had been raped, though there were no witnesses and no physical evidence.
The youths, between the ages of 13 and 19, were quickly put on trial in front of an all-White, all-male jury that sentenced eight of them to death. The American Communist Party spearheaded a campaign of protests, speeches and letter writing. The case went to the Supreme Court, which voted 7-2 to set aside the death sentences.
The case was a denial of due process within the meaning of the 14th Amendment, Justice George Sutherland wrote. If their convictions had resulted in execution, he said, it “would be little short of judicial murder.”
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Brown v. Board of Education, May 1954
Just as the 14th Amendment was used in the creation of Jim Crow laws, it was used to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson because of one word: equal.
Oliver Brown’s daughter had to be bused to a school far from her family’s home in Topeka, Kansas, even though they lived near a perfectly good school – for Whites. Brown shook the nation with his landmark case, proving that segregation was not equality, beginning the desegregation of American schools thanks to the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
In a widely researched opinion on the court’s unanimous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren cited psychological studies on the impact of school segregation on Black children and said that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
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Mapp v. Ohio, 1961
It began with the bombing of boxing promoter Don King’s home in 1954. And it was primarily a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure case.
Ohio police got a tip that the bombing suspect was in the home of Dollree Mapp. The police didn’t find a bomber, but they did find pornographic books – “Affairs of a Troubadour” was one – in a basement footlocker she said belonged to a previous tenant, according to the case transcript. Mapp was convicted of obscenity charges that carried a seven-year sentence.
She appealed, and it went to the Supreme Court. That’s where the 14th Amendment came in, with the argument that the amendment’s due process clause upheld Mapp’s Fourth Amendment protection of privacy in state cases.
The Fourth Amendment was murky in its power on a state level. But the 14th Amendment’s due process clause strengthened the requirement of a person’s due process in state courts, the court ruled.
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Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965
The state law banning contraceptives “was a weapon against immorality” and discourages “extra-marital indulgence,” Joseph B. Clark, attorney for the state of Connecticut, argued before the Supreme Court, according to a March 31, 1965, story in the Washington Daily News.
Estelle T. Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood in New Haven, had been arrested on charges of giving birth control advice to three patients. The Supreme Court arguments were graphic as the state attorney talked about fornication, the rhythm method and adultery.
Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority, asking: “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” He agreed that the 14th Amendment’s due process clause ensured the fundamental right to privacy.
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Loving v. Virginia, 1967
“These are slavery laws pure and simple,” Philip H. Hirschkop, attorney for Richard and Mildred Loving, told the Supreme Court in 1967. “They robbed the Negro race of its dignity and dignity is fundamental to liberty.”
The Lovings, an interracial couple married in D.C. in 1959, were arrested and convicted in Virginia for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law. It’s not unusual for this to be a 14th Amendment case, but it illustrates the power of invoking the amendment in a growing scope of civic life that wasn’t considered during its ratification in 1868.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was unequivocal in his rebuke of such laws in his decision: “The clear and central purpose of the 14th Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States,” he wrote.