Supreme court rulings in 1870s

• The series of Supreme Court rulings in 1870s and 1880s that weakened radical policy in the years before.
• 1873 - Slaughterhouse cases - named because they involved a suit against a New Orleans slaughterhouse. In these cases, the conservative Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment protected US citizens from rights infringements only on a federal level, not on a state level.
• 1876 - Supreme Court ruled in US v Cruikshank that only states, not the federal government, could prosecute individuals under the KKK Act of 1871. As a result, countless Klan crimes went unpunished by southern state governments, who tacitly condoned the violence.
• The Civil Rights cases of 1883 - in these rulings, the Court further declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, saying that the 14th Amendment applied only to discrimination from the government, not from individuals.