Civil and political rights
Civil rights include the ensuring of peoples' physical and mental integrity, life, and safety; protection from discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, color, age, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, and disability; and individual rights such as privacy and the freedoms of thought, speech, religion, press, assembly, and movement.
Civil Rights Cases
Justice Harlan dissented against the Court's narrow interpretation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments for all five of the cases. He argued Congress was attempting to overcome the refusal of the states to protect the rights denied to African Americans that white citizens took as their birthright. Private railroads ("Olcott v. Supervisors") were by law public highways, and it was the function of the government to make and maintain highways for the conveyance of the public; that innkeepers have long been held to be "a sort of public servants" ("Rex v. Ivens" 1835 7 Car. & P. 213) that had no right to deny to anyone "conducting himself in a proper manner" admission to his inn; and that public amusements are maintained under a license coming from the State. He also found that the lack of protection from the 1875 Civil Rights Act would result in the violation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, largely on the same grounds. Harlan J would have held the Civil Rights Act of 1875 valid, because people were left ‘practically at the mercy of corporations and individuals wielding power under public authority’. His judgment went as follows.
The opinion in these cases proceeds, as it seems to me, upon grounds entirely too narrow and artificial. The substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism. 'It is not the words of the law but the internal sense of it that makes the law. The letter of the law is the body; the sense and reason of the law is the soul.' Constitutional provisions, adopted in the interest of liberty, and for the purpose of securing, through national legislation, if need be, rights inhering in a state of freedom, and belonging to American citizenship, have been so construed as to defeat the ends the people desired to accomplish, which they attempted to accomplish, and which they supposed they had accomplished by changes in their fundamental law. By this I do not mean that the determination of these cases should have been materially controlled by considerations of mere expediency or policy. I mean only, in this form, to express an earnest conviction that the court has departed from the familiar rule requiring, in the interpretation of constitutional provisions, that full effect be given to the intent with which they were adopted.