Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
ANALOGIES
Analogy enables you to discuss something or someone, directly, symbolically, without any names, but as though they were named!
This happens often in law, where for example, the United States Supreme Court--the same one which wrote Dred Scott in 1857--decided the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873, involving butchers in New Orleans. They were combatting a Louisiana statute describing where all future butchery was to be confined (one city-owned facility only), for a fee.
Previously , butchers could ply their trade wherever and whenever they had wanted to do so. Now the former freedom was displaced by a state law for a fee at one city site.
Now, on its face, black people are not implicated by that court case, right? Wrong! By analogy, this case was used to limit the sweep of the newly enacted 14th Amendment. That civil rights law had everything to do about newly freed black people's rights of equal protection of the law and due process of the law, which rights were also new to them. Blacks formerly had no rights. They did not matter, unless a white man said so, as it had formerly held.
These butchers, the Court said, had federal rights to due process and equal protection of the law. But here no federal law was violated, just state law, to which the new 14th Amendment could not apply, ruled the Court.
So, the butchers lost their freedom to butcher as they had before, while black people lost rights they never had before! Black folks "lost" the Slaughterhouse Case, although they knew nothing about the case's existence, they were never parties. They just lost because of racism. They lost due to an unarticulated analogy.
As there were then few, if any, federal rights in existence in that early era of "states' rights", for anyone of any color, the Court preemptively took away the implied rights, protections of the 14th Amendment, beforehand, intended for blacks, away from the newly freed people, who could not have known what evil lay ahead for them in court!
It was that spawny, slick, sleight of hand, an infamous judicial analogy that had been butchered out the law going forward by the Supreme Court. Left behind were former Confederate states ' rights! Jim Crow segregation, peonage, basically the reinstitution of slavery, in all but name, where black folks still had no rights that white folks were bound to respect under the 14th Amendment, the despite Civil War!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughter-House_Cases