The Slaughterhouse Cases, a consolidation of multiple lawsuits, argued that because of a Louisiana law forming a sanctioned corporate monopoly over the butchering trade, individual butchers would lose their right to practice their profession and earn a living as citizens. Argued February 3–5, 1873, and decided April 14, 1873, the decision rendered in the Slaughterhouse Cases is a unique example of a single U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively reversed the political and popular will of the drafters of the amendment. The decision came just five years after ratification and less than a decade after the beginning of the American Civil War. Unlike the Constitution itself or many of its amendments, the intended meaning of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were well known in 1873.