The Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government lacked constitutional authority, mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment, to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations. The court ruling stated that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. The decision was challenged by the Justice Harman as a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Court nevertheless with overwhelming majority ruled that neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendment granted the Federal state jurisdiction over these five cases. "This ruling," as argued by some scholars, "practically put an end to the federal government's attempt to enforce the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment" (Barnes and Connolly, 1999, p. 338). In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the rights of individual states that narrowly defined the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Louisiana State protected a monopoly power to the detriment of individual workers. The Supreme Court could have ruled that the "privileges and immunities" clause empowered the Federal government to protect citizens from the infringement by state governments. "By declining to do so," as Ross (1998) argued,...
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