Fundamental Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment

In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Supreme Court gave its first major interpretation of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The result was a narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause that left intact the basic antebellum understanding of the relationship between the Bill of Rights and the States that we saw in Barron v. Baltimore (1833). However, that understanding began to change in the 20th century when the Supreme Court started incorporating aspects of the Bill of Rights into how it read the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.