The Slaughterhouse Cases represented the Supreme Court’s first interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Court construed narrowly the rights protected by the amendment. After the state of Louisiana granted one company a monopoly to operate a slaughterhouse in New Orleans, several local butchers sued, alleging that the state had deprived them of one of the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, by denying them the right to earn a living. The Supreme Court ruled that the amendment applied only to privileges and immunities attached to United States citizenship, not state citizenship, and therefore extended only to rights named in the Constitution. The right to operate a slaughterhouse not being a privilege of United States citizenship, the butchers did not have a valid claim under the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision set a precedent for the narrow interpretation the Supreme Court applied to the Fourteenth Amendment in the decades following its adoption.