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The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. By Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xiv, 295 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1290-4.)
Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie have written the first comprehensive study of the most controversial court decision of the Reconstruction era. The book deals not just with the famous Slaughter-house Cases of 1873 but with "the slaughterhouse cases" more generally: a remarkably convoluted morass of litigation that produced four different U.S. Supreme Court decisions, along with numerous other rulings by Louisiana state judges, the Louisiana Supreme Court, and lower federal courts, stretching over eighteen years from 1869 to 1887.
In these lawsuits, the butchers of New...