If you are familiar with the historical question about the meaning of the "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether it incorporates the Second Amendment against the states, you may find this of interest. The "privileges and immunities" clause appears first in the Constitution, Art. IV, sec. 2, where it guaranteed that "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." What does that mean? There are a number of arguments about how that was understood, but I found this discussion quite interesting, in an 1838 complaint from black Ohioans about discriminatory laws of that state:
All residents of the state were prohibited, by penal laws, from hiring or employing, in any manner whatever, any person subject to this law, who had failed to comply with its provisions, while the citizens of other states, who had not gained a residence, were exempted from such penalties. Nor were the projectors of this measure satisfied with casting them out beyond the protection of law, and depriving them of the means of obtaining a lawful subsistence: but they made it the duty of the officers of townships to remove them by force out of the state, for disobedience to these laws. By the same process of legislation, every right secured by the constitution may be taken from the citizens of the state. The right of suffrage, the right to bear arms, the right of the people to assemble together and consult for the common good; the right to speak, write, and print upon any subject, might be trammeled with such conditions, as to preclude their free exercise by a large portion of the citizens to whom they are secured. There is no greater security given for the right of suffrage, to those who now enjoy it, by the constitution, than is given to all men of acquiring and protecting property, pursuing happiness and safety, and of enjoying personal liberty. The constitution was formed with a full knowledge that our population was comprised of white and colored persons. The rights and privileges of the one class were as clearly defined and settled, and as sacredly secured, as the other, by that instrument. The discrimination was distinctly made and expressed in unequivocal terms, whenever it was intended to confer any political privilege upon the one, from which the other was to be excluded. But these laws are not only repugnant to the constitution of this state, and to the principles of our free institutions, they are also in direct contravention of the constitution of the United States. That document declares, that 'the citizens of each shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.' What is the plain and obvious import of this provision? What was the manifest design of its insertion? Can there be any doubt as to its construction or intention? Was it not intended to secure to all the citizens, in each state, the right of ingress and egress to and from them, and the privileges of trade, commerce, and employment in them, of acquiring and holding property, and sustaining and defending life and liberty in any state in the Union? Does it not form one of the conditions of our national compact?[1]
[1] “Unconstitutional Laws of Ohio,” The Liberator, April 6, 1838.
Their argument seems to be that "privileges and immunities" meant the protections of the Constitution for individual rights--such as the ones that they list. Hmmm. That's the argument that "full incorporation" advocates make--that the Fourteenth Amendment's "privileges and immunities" clause was supposed to impose the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights onto the states.
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