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popularly The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), limited the protections provided by the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibits states from denying any person “the equal protection of the law”). Specifically the Supreme Court ruled that a state-sanctioned slaughtering monopoly did not abridge other slaughterhouse owners' privileges and immunities as U.S. citizens and deprive them of property rights, as they had claimed. The Court thereby refused to extend federal protection of civil rights to the property rights of businesspersons, but in so doing it unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks and other minorities.

545 U.S. 469 (2005), held that a city's action in taking private property and selling it to a private developer with the aim of improving the city's bad economy does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The Supreme Court found that because the taking of private property to sell for private development served a public purpose, it satisfied the “public use” requirement of the Fifth Amendment. Kelo upheld prior decisions rejecting public ownership as the sole method available to promote development that benefits the larger community. The Court stated that the judicial branch must defer to legislatures in determining the public need that justifies a taking, and the course used to fulfill that need.

221 U.S. 1 (1911), dissolved 34 companies controlled by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust as constituting a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. While in one sense the case was the high point of the “trust-busting” efforts of two presidents (see also Northern Securities Co. v. United States), in another sense it marked a turn toward a more conservative interpretation of the Sherman Act. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White promulgated the idea that a restraint of trade by a monopolistic business must be “unreasonable” to be illegal under the Sherman Act. White's failure, however, to define a “reasonable” restraint, coupled with the imprecise brevity of the Sherman Act, made subsequent antitrust decisions exceedingly difficult to predict.