Rescuing the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges or Immunities Clause: How "Attrition of Parliamentary Processes" Begat Accidental Ambiguity; How Ambiguity Begat Slaughter-House

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This Essay addresses a topic of great academic and practical interest currently facing the Supreme Court: whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which has lain dormant since the Court's ill-conceived 1873 Slaughter-House Cases decision, should be resurrected in order to apply the Second Amendment to the states.

The Essay makes the novel argument that the textual basis for the Slaughter-House Court's holding regarding the clause - i.e., the lack of parallel textual construction in the first two sentences of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment regarding citizenship) - was in fact the wholly unintentional product of what we might call "attrition of parliamentary processes." …