Should the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment now be revisited 147 years after the amendment was ratified, followed five years afterwards by a Supreme Court decision whose interpretation of the clause has persisted since then?[1] Just as the Slaughterhouse Cases decision has persisted, so has the controversy surrounding it. The growing level of attention focused on the clause in recent years, for example, and the burgeoning legal literature seeking to revitalize it prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to characterize it as the “darling of the professoriate.”[2]

Why, among thousands of decisions of the Court, many of which also continue to generate strong disagreement yet are acknowledged as having been settled by the passage of time, has Slaughterhouse become the central focus of so much academic effort to secure revisiting and reconsideration? It is not, I would suggest, in order to perfect a Constitution that is marred only by a singularly wayward judicial decision.

I would not revisit the Privileges or Immunities Clause at this time. I would not do so because to this day, it is not clear what the clause was intended to accomplish; because what I believe was most likely intended has long since been accomplished by other clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment; and because the continuing debate over the meaning of the clause is largely between factions of the “professoriate,” many of whom seem bent on conferring meanings to the clause that were never even remotely contemplated by its framers and ratifiers. The common result of these interpretations would be to further centralize and strengthen governmental power—in particular, that of the federal government at the expense of state governments and that of the judiciary at the expense of more accountable and representative branches of government.

In the words of constitutional historian David Currie, the present debate reflects the “incessant quest for the judicial holy grail…the discovery of a clause that lets [judges] strike down any law [they] do not like.”[3] This at a time when there is already within our judicial culture far too much “holy grail”–like decision-making in which the personal preferences of judges and justices have come increasingly to displace the policy determinations of “we the people” acting through the democratic institutions of government.

“Privileges or Immunities” Defined

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

Slaughterhouse almost certainly erred in concluding that the Privileges or Immunities Clause, generally understood as describing the rights belonging equally to citizens of the national and state governments, pertained only to the privileges or immunities of national citizenship. The Court’s interpretation was hardly frivolous, comparing the two categories of citizenship set forth in the first sentence with the single category of privileges or immunities set forth in the second sentence. Nonetheless, it was almost certainly the purpose of the latter, by its reference to “citizens of the United States,” not to define and limit the scope of rights protected to those that attached to national citizenship, all of which were already protected against state abridgement by the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution,[4] but rather to define the scope of persons protected.

In short, the purpose of the first sentence was to overturn the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision,[5] holding that blacks could not be citizens of the United States, and to provide that all persons, including free and emancipated blacks, who met the citizenship requirements of this sentence were both national and state citizens and thereby entitled under the second sentence to the privileges or immunities of both of these citizenships. “Citizens of the United States” were concurrently citizens of the United States and citizens of their state.

Thus, while Slaughterhouse recognized the division of privileges or immunities into those belonging to national and state citizenships, the Court, by its construction of the clause, had no need to define the nature or substance of state privileges or immunities,[6] since these were not the subject of the clause’s protections. Possibly also, the Court itself was unclear as to what privileges or immunities encompassed, and perhaps understandably so, since over the ensuing century and a half, lawyers, judges, and the professoriate have still reached no consensus in their understanding of the term.

Judge Robert Bork has contended that the clause remains an “inkblot,” a “Rorschach test,” and “inscrutable,” while others who have looked closely at both its text and its historical record have variously concluded that it is “confused,” “utterly uncertain,” “virtually boundless,” “shadowy,” “a blank check,” “standardless,” “mysterious and cabalistic,” “vague and variegated,” “inconsistent,” and “murky.” Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a former Attorney General of the United States, was perhaps the most perceptive observer during the congressional debates on the clause when he remarked, “I do not understand what will be its effect.”[7]

Although I believe the Slaughterhouse majority (four of the five justices of which had been appointed by Presidents Lincoln or Grant) erred in a critical aspect of its interpretation of the clause and thereby stunted the proper development of both the clause and the amendment, I also believe the decision was correct in its recognition that the three clauses of the first section of the new amendment (Privileges or Immunities, Equal Protection, and Due Process) showed a “unity of purpose when taken in connection with a history of the times…the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”[8]

Furthermore, I believe the decision was correct in its understanding that although the three post–Civil War amendments “thought proper to impose additional limitations on the States, and to confer additional power on that of the Nation…we do not see in those amendments any purpose to destroy the main features of the general system.” In particular, the Court did not see any purpose to “constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States” or “to radically change the whole theory of the relations of the State and Federal governments to each other and of both these governments to the people.”[9]

Finally, I believe the ultimate holding in Slaughterhouse, a case having nothing to do with the “unity of purpose” of the Fourteenth Amendment in upholding black civil rights, was correct in rejecting a challenge to a Louisiana law consolidating for health and sanitary purposes the venue of the slaughtering trade in New Orleans.[10] In refusing to strike down what it viewed as an ordinary exercise of the state’s traditional “police power” to promote “health, good order, morals, peace and safety,” the Court majority rejected the dissenters’ assertions of substantive due process[11] and their comparison of the conditions of the butchers disadvantaged by Louisiana’s law with the “servitude” from which blacks had just been freed by the Thirteenth Amendment.[12]

Interpreting the Clause

Two principal questions must be addressed by anyone choosing to revisit the Privileges or Immunities Clause:

• Does the clause establish a minimum or substantive level of protection of privileges or immunities or simply require non-discrimination as to such rights?
• Which rights comprise the protected privileges or immunities?

These are both difficult questions because both the constitutional language and the intentions of the framers and ratifiers are considerably less clear than they might have been. As Professor Donald Dripps has written, “to say that the clause is consistent with one’s own theory of its meaning is uninteresting because the clause is consistent with almost anything.”[13]

Nonetheless, because it is relevant to my conclusion concerning the wisdom of now revisiting the clause, I will briefly offer my own perspectives as to its most plausible, if not necessarily impregnable, meaning.[14] This analysis is largely in accord with one I prepared nearly 30 years ago as Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy in the Reagan Administration for Attorney General Edwin Meese in anticipation of litigation.[15] Its conclusions are perhaps best captured by Professor John Harrison, who, in summarizing his own more recent and thoughtful analysis of the clause, has concluded that “the words do say something; indeed they say exactly what their historical context would lead us to expect them to mean.”[16]

In short, the clause comprised a central part of a constitutional amendment proposed and ratified within three years of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox bringing an end to the Civil War. During those three years, so-called Black Codes were enacted throughout much of the South seeking to deprive blacks of the fruits of their emancipation. Both the text and legislative history, as well as the obvious historical context, of the Privileges or Immunities Clause suggest, although there is hardly consensus, that the Constitution was thereby amended to ensure that all rights of citizenship would be enjoyed equally by white and black citizens. While an even more expansive and momentous constitutional reform can doubtless be imagined—and while such imagining is precisely what appears to unite most contemporary scholarship on the subject—full legal equality between the races, with expanded federal enforcement powers, was hardly a minor accomplishment and in conjunction with the other Reconstruction Amendments[17] represented an altogether appropriate and plenary response to both the Civil War and the Black Codes that ensued in its wake.

By this understanding, the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provided an intrastate guarantee of non-discrimination between white and black citizens just as the similarly worded Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the original Constitution (the Comity Clause) had earlier provided an interstate guarantee of non-discrimination between citizens of one state while in another state.[18]

What unites these provisions, in addition to their identity of language, is their purpose and non-discrimination focus. Each extends certain rights of state citizenship to a class of persons who had not previously enjoyed these rights: Article IV extending these rights to the citizens of other states and the Fourteenth Amendment extending these rights to black citizens. And just as Article IV judged the non-resident citizen’s rights by comparing these to the rights enjoyed by resident citizens,[19] I believe the Fourteenth Amendment judged the black citizen’s rights by comparing these to the rights enjoyed by white citizens.

The rights described are rights of non-discrimination, and as state citizenship rights, these are defined by the states themselves and not by the Bill of Rights, “natural rights,” or any other external standard.[20] If state privileges or immunities were defined in the latter manner as a guarantee of minimum or substantive rights, such rights would then be identical in every state and thus be tantamount to national privileges or immunities, applicable as a function of national and not state citizenship.

Thus, the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was to be understood, as had been the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV for the previous 80 years, by reference to the privileges or immunities actually enacted by each state for its own citizens.[21] Whatever these were, so too were the privileges or immunities that would have to be extended equally to white and black citizens within that state. As Professor Harold Hyman has written:

Instead of formulating positively national civil-rights minima, as some Republican Radicals preferred to do, the Amendment forbade unequal deprivations of the broad, uncodified, vague mass of civil-rights practices which a state professed to afford equally to the generality of its citizens. Thus, the Amendment assumed the familiar cast of the 1787 Constitution’s Bill of Rights without specifying bills of wrongs for every state. The states would do that job. At a given moment a state’s laws, constitutions, procedures and customs would be the catalogue of what a state must not selectively deny to its free Americans. As in the [Civil Rights Act of 1866], states could turn off a national presence by equalizing official intrastate life styles.[22]

Concerning the second question laid out in this section—what rights constitute the privileges or immunities, or citizenship rights, that must be applied non-discriminatorily?—the congressional debates repeatedly invoked one of three possible meanings:

• The rights set forth in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a statute whose constitutionality the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure;[23]
• The rights set forth in Corfield v. Coryell, a federal circuit court Comity Clause decision in 1823;[24] or
• A more contemporary understanding of Comity Clause rights.[25]

What is significant is that each of these sources of rights had been defined by reference to its equal application within the states, and determination by the states themselves, rather than by reference to some external assemblage of substantive rights determined by federal courts and the Congress.

Those who seek to give meaning to the Privileges or Immunities Clause can reasonably disagree in many respects, but the following are several of the principal interpretive clues that have persuaded me that the clause is best understood as requiring the non-discriminatory treatment of black citizens and not the adoption of the Bill of Rights, “natural rights,” or some other aggregation of federally determined substantive rights: [26]

• The identity between the language of the non-discrimination–only Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV and the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the common purpose of these provisions to confer fundamental rights of state citizenship upon those who had not previously been entitled to such rights.
• The largely parallel and contemporaneous histories of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Privileges or Immunities Bill of 1866, each of which was non-discrimination–only, with the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the fact that the latter was repeatedly described as ensuring the constitutional validity of the former.[27]
• That the critical phrase at issue, although intended as a legal term of art, is nonetheless comprised of two terms, “privileges” and “immunities,” each of which seems more suggestive of a provision addressing unequal or disparate treatments and less suggestive of the conferral of a substantive or minimum legal entitlement.[28]
• The contrast between the coverage of the Privileges or Immunities Clause to “citizens” and the coverage of subsequent clauses of the same Fourteenth Amendment to “persons.” If it had been the intention of the amendment to incorporate the Bill of Rights, why would this have been pursued through the one clause that excludes tourists, business visitors, non-citizens, and others lawfully within the country from such protections as the freedom of speech and the right to confront witnesses?[29]
• The fundamental recognition that what had harmed free blacks prior to the Civil War and what promised to harm all blacks after the war was not the absence of incorporation-type privileges or immunities (substantive federal rights that had been the subject of little judicial application up to that time) but the absence of Comity Clause–type privileges or immunities (state citizenship rights).
• The correlation between the non-discriminatory context in which the term “abridge” is employed in Section 2 of the amendment and its use in the clause: to wit, in each instance, to describe a matter subject to plenary state control (in Section 2 voter qualifications in state elections) yet to prohibit state actions in that realm undertaken in a discriminatory manner.
• That an understanding of the clause as conferring a substantive rather than a non-discriminatory entitlement would largely nullify the distinctions between national and state privileges or immunities implied in the first sentence of the clause, since all states would then be obligated to recognize a uniform array of privileges or immunities defined by the federal courts and Congress.[30] Moreover, what would be the point of characterizing a body of citizenship rights defined by a different sovereign as comprising the privileges or immunities of that citizenship, particularly if one views as a threshold right of citizenship the right to participate in self-government?[31]

Finally, in my view, the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment is replete with statements explaining the Privileges or Immunities Clause in terms of its constitutionalization of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, its affinity with the language of the Comity Clause, and its responsiveness to the evils that had brought about the Civil War and prompted the adoption of Southern Black Codes, accompanied by expressions of intentions to maintain the constitutional structures of the country except as necessary to address these evils.[32] It is considerably more difficult, on the other hand, to find statements clearly asserting an intention to impose the Bill of Rights upon the states,[33] discussions explaining how state constitutions had proven deficient in not protecting these same rights, acknowledgments of the significance of the changes in the constitutional structure that would be wrought by incorporation, or explanations of the rationale for including the Northern states in the impending transformation,[34] all of which might have been expected had it genuinely been Congress’s intention to incorporate the Bill of Rights by the Privileges or Immunities clause. It is similarly difficult to find references in the debates to the works of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, or any other intellectual light in examining the implications of establishing natural rights as the “supreme law of the land.”[35]

In the latter regard, one might also have thought that past judicial debates concerning the relevance of natural rights as a tool of constitutional interpretation might have been referenced, if only to emphasize which jurisprudential understandings were supposedly being affirmed and repudiated by the new clause. It may be especially useful to recall the remarks of Justice Iredell in his exchange with Justice Chase in one of the nation’s earliest Supreme Court opinions in reminding us today why there might have been at least one or two Members of the Congress moved to respond to the notion that a “higher law” provision was being incorporated into our Constitution:

The ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard: the ablest and the purest men have differed upon the subject; and all that the Court could properly say, in such an event, would be, that the Legislature (possessed of an equal right of opinion) had passed an act which, in the opinion of the judges, was inconsistent with the abstract principles of natural justice.[36]

In the end perhaps, I find most telling and persuasive the negative legislative history of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the “dog that did not bark,” during the debates. In the aftermath of the Civil War, and in the midst of a difficult and divisive Reconstruction, did the Congress truly intend to risk a further heightening of tensions by an amendment radically altering our constitutional system in ways having almost nothing to do with an equality of African–American civil rights, while transforming not only the relationship of the Southern states to the national government, but also that of the prevailing Northern states? As has more than once before been asked, were Northern armies marching under state flags in order to diminish their own states’ sovereignty?

Judge Bork has opined in this regard:

[It is not easy] to imagine that Northern states, victorious in a Civil War that led to the 14th Amendment, should have decided to turn over to the federal courts not only the protection of the rights of freed slaves but an unlimited power to frustrate the will of the Northern states themselves.[37]

Legal historian Raoul Berger has similarly observed, “[Republican legislators] simply dare[d] not hold out to the Ratifiers that the North, which had not been guilty of the offensive practices of the South, would be deprived of control over its own civil and criminal administration.”[38] And he has further inquired, “Where is the clearly expressed intention…to curtail Northern control of its own destiny, and under cover of ‘equal protection’ and ‘privileges or immunities’ to extend federal intervention in local affairs to an undreamed-of extent?”[39] While Professor Charles Fairman has opined:

The freedom that the states traditionally have exercised to develop their own system for administering justice repels any thought that the federal provisions on grand jury, criminal jury, and civil jury were fastened upon them in 1868 [by incorporation]. Congress would not have attempted such a thing, the country would not have stood for it, the legislatures would not have ratified. The electoral campaign of 1868 was fought over the proposed amendment but the debates never took the turn of suggesting that ratification would involve major changes in the administration of justice in the Northern states.[40]

It is particularly unlikely that a Northern citizenry, having been inflamed just several years earlier by the Dred Scott decision,[41] discovering a new constitutional right to introduce slavery into the territories through what came to be known as substantive due process, would have consented to allow the same jurisprudential practice, and the same broad exercise of judicial discretion, to become a permanent part of the constitutional landscape by a clause conferring upon judges the power to facilitate the “pursuit of happiness,” the “common sentiments of the people,” “silent and unenumerated rights,” “natural and inalienable rights,” or even the ends of the great Wealth of Nations.[42]

That neither side in Slaughterhouse did a particularly good job of giving meaning to the Privileges or Immunities Clause is most likely due to the fact that it would have been difficult for anyone to have done this. As observed by Professor Fairman, in addition to the ambiguity of the constitutional text itself, the congressional debates were marked by “barren discussions,” without any “clear conceptions,” free of any explanations of “fundamental principles,” absent any “clear ideas as to its confines,” without “awareness of the want of their own understanding,” and with no declaration of what was to be the “basis of its measure.”[43]

Revisiting the Clause

What, then, are the present circumstances that might inform the wisdom of revisiting and reconsidering the Privileges or Immunities Clause?

Despite the constitutional tumult and transformation of the past 140 years, much of it centered upon the very Fourteenth Amendment of which the Privileges or Immunities Clause is a part, Slaughterhouse has remained intact as the law of the land. While it is only occasionally cited, the decision has never been repudiated or even limited.

Yet “the changes in the American federal system which Chief Justice Miller sought to prevent [in Slaughterhouse] have come about anyway, and the police power of the states, which he sought to uphold, has been continuously limited since at least the 1890s.”[44] The emergence and development of such labyrinthine constitutional concepts as substantive due process, incorporation, “suspect classifications,” rational basis review, and “fundamental rights” protections have altered the relationship between state and national governments in ways that could never have been anticipated by the majority justices in Slaughterhouse, but these concepts have taken root not within the Privileges or Immunities Clause, but within other clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In particular, the broad racial non-discrimination focus of the clause has been alternatively achieved since shortly after Slaughterhouse through the Equal Protection Clause, while incorporation of the Bill of Rights has been achieved through the Due Process Clause. More generally, the jurisprudence of the dissenting justices in Slaughterhouse—the substantive approach to due process, the expansiveness of the legislative categories subjected to judicial scrutiny, the receptiveness to unenumerated rights, and the federalization of constitutional rights—have each to one degree or another come to prevail as the law of the land.[45]

What, then, is the point of revisiting the Privileges or Immunities Clause today? Why should what has been settled for 140 years now be unsettled? Have not compensating interpretations of other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment largely rendered irrelevant the missteps of Slaughterhouse? If so, are current reform efforts merely intended to reconfigure the clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment so that each more precisely can be made to reflect the original intentions of the Framers?

The latter is not what is at stake. Few proponents of revisiting the Fourteenth Amendment speak of revisiting any provision other than the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Despite the close relationship of the three clauses in Section 1 in furthering the amendment’s “unity of purpose,” it is only the Privileges or Immunities Clause that remains unsettled, and it remains unsettled not because it has been defined imperfectly—although it has been—but because, unlike the other two clauses, each of which has also been defined imperfectly, as a consequence of Slaughterhouse, the Privileges or Immunities Clause offers an opportunity to provide new meaning to the Constitution—not, to be sure, the meaning originally intended by its framers, for that has already been achieved by different means, but a genuinely new meaning and all without the bother of a new constitutional amendment.

The purpose of revisiting the Privileges or Immunities Clause is to place something both “new” and “more” into the Constitution. It is to fill what is viewed as an empty vessel of a provision with something of consequence. It is to facilitate the attainment of the judicial “holy grail.” The clause is uniquely susceptible to an infusion of new and expanded meaning because it is seen as a “glittering generality” capable of accommodating almost any of the creative and innovative theories of its meaning that have been offered by one legal academician after another. There is no interest in merely affirming the constitutional status quo or in guaranteeing rights that are already guaranteed, but in transforming a dormant provision into something far more “meaningful.”

As a result, there will be no need to work for reforms or policies in the 50 state legislatures, or even in the Congress, and equally no need to organize national constitutional amendment efforts within those same bodies, and no need to secure any popular consensus or support among the American people for constitutional change. Rather, all that will be necessary will be to persuade a small number of judges that a provision that has lain unused for 140 years, with its enticingly obscure language guaranteeing to all certain “privileges” and “immunities,” provides an overlooked source of constitutional power, the intricacies of which have been expounded upon at length by a thousand scholars writing in a thousand law reviews of the land.

My first reason, then, for opposing the present revisiting of the clause is because I do not believe it will result in a more accurately interpreted Constitution. Most proposals for revisiting the Privileges or Immunities Clause have little to do with further alleviating the “badges or incidents” of slavery, redressing more subtle or camouflaged Black Code–like public policies, securing more comprehensively non-discriminatory laws, or otherwise securing the full and complete emancipation and equal citizenship of African Americans.

My second reason for opposing this revisiting is because, to quote Senator Johnson again, “I do not know what it will mean.” Scholars and academics looking to the identical language, history, and context of the clause have, for example, recently discovered in it the possibility of the following constitutional guarantees: “positive rights to public benefits,” “minimum welfare standards,” “welfare state rights,” the “obligation of equal treatment,” “educational equality,” “redistributive mutual aid policies,” “natural rights,” “overcom[ing] the limitations of the ‘state action’ requirement,” “common-law rights,” “sexual rights,” “health care rights,” “distinctly personal rights,” the ability to redress “economic disparities,” “natural and inalienable rights,” “fundamental rights,” “union rights,” “equal standing in the national political community,” the right to redress “violations of customary international law,” “opportunities to make the most of our lives,” “silent and unenumerated rights,” “privacy rights,” “economic rights,” “rights of felons,” “fundamental rights contained in the [Northwest] Ordinance,” “private law rights,” “the rights of citizens of free governments, “all of the rights in the Bill of Rights” including those that have not yet been incorporated, “unenumerated fundamental rights,” “international human rights,” “rights stemming from our obligations to our communities,” “social and economic entitlements necessary to make national citizenship meaningful and effective,” and “rights drawn from our affirmative entitlements”—to name a few. While there may be widespread agreement that the clause was wrongly construed in Slaughterhouse, there is no similar agreement as to how it might now be rightly construed.[46]

Thus, the revisiting of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is the judicial analog of the 1,032-page law that must be enacted before it can be read and understood. What this revisiting will produce is anyone’s guess, and only lawyers and judges will be engaged in the process of choosing among the meanings that might be given to the clause. The only meaning that seems beyond the pale is the meaning that was actually intended by its framers, for that meaning has since been achieved by alternative provisions of the Constitution. In short, we have no idea what the new law will mean after it has undergone revisiting.

These decisions will ultimately be made not by “we the people” or by their representatives, but by federal judges who, because the constitutional language to be interpreted has already remained unclear for a century and a half, will almost certainly be engaged less in parsing this language than in parsing their own consciences. Each new decision specifying what constitutes a “privilege” or an “immunity” will be less an interpretation of the Constitution than an amendment of that Constitution. The discovery of each new constitutional “right” will be balanced by a dilution and erosion of the Constitution’s legislative power, its federalist and separation-of-powers premises, its first principles of representative self-government, and its pervading proposition of the rule of law.[47]

It will be the equivalent of a continuing constitutional convention in which judges will be empowered to give meaning—a meaning almost certainly never even contemplated by its framers—to far-reaching and nebulous constitutional language. Rather than determining what is included as a privilege or immunity, the more apt question over time may become: What is not included?

The very strength of the Privileges or Immunities Clause for many advocates of its revisiting is its vagueness and open-endedness, under which an almost limitless assortment of new constitutional rights can be judicially divined, free from the limitations and encrustations of decisions and doctrines that have been built into other clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment over the past century and a half. The clause affords an entirely clean slate in a way that none of these other clauses can.[48]

Finally, it is worth noting with regard to the efforts of Justice Thomas to revisit and reconsider the clause[49] that not one of his colleagues has joined in this endeavor, including those in the closest philosophical accord such as Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts. Indeed, the only justices who have ever appeared to share Justice Thomas’s interest in revisiting and reconsidering have been Justices Douglas, Murphy, Black, and Rutledge,[50] each of whom was arguably in the least philosophical accord. Furthermore, Justice Thomas himself has recognized the need to safeguard against “the specter that the [clause] will become yet another convenient tool for inventing new rights, limited solely by the predilections of those who happen at the time to be Members of this Court.”[51] At least in my judgment, that specter has in no way yet been dispelled.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson has likened the Privileges or Immunities Clause to a “dormant volcano” whose “eruption would be both difficult to predict and to contain.”

Neither the language of the clause nor any judicial interpretations provide useful guidance in determining what rights would be fundamental…. For the very reason that it has so long remained a clean slate, a revitalized “privileges or immunities” clause holds special hazards for judges who are mindful that their proper task is not to write their personal views of appropriate public policy into the Constitution…. [T]here is much to be said for continuing the present predictability of [the clause’s] jurisprudence and not engaging in a disruptive roll of the dice.[52]

In considering whether the clause should be revisited and given new meaning, it is fair to take into consideration the evolution of our modern legal and judicial cultures. A revitalized clause has every likelihood of becoming a wellspring of new judicially determined rights, and it is a source that will not easily or soon run dry. Its language out of context means everything and it means nothing; its legislative history accurately reflects the confusion of its framers; and its original intentions have been made to seem trivial and inconsequential by the passage of time. Only its historical context—its placement within the timeline of our nation’s history—would seem to suggest its true meaning.

But even here, it is the negative context that is most compelling, the evidence that should have been there but was not if it had been the purpose of the clause to achieve something beyond equalizing the condition of those who had been accursed by our “peculiar institution.” That the purpose of the clause was so obvious does not mean that it was not so. To transform such a provision into a do-anything-or-everything grant of authority to an already over-empowered judiciary lacks any historical or jurisprudential basis.

The burden of proof for constitutional change is upon the proponents of that change, and proponents of conferring some uncertain new meaning upon the Privileges or Immunities Clause are nowhere close to having satisfied that burden. As Justice Scalia has warned, “by trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all.”