Amendments to the Constitution 11-27
Amendment XIII · Ratified December 6, 1865
Abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Amendment XIII · Ratified December 6, 1865
Court decisions citing this, by year.The marker is when it took effect. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), abolishing slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), establishing birthright citizenship — directly overriding Dred Scott’s holdings that enslaved people and their descendants could not be citizens.
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968), is a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court held that Congress could regulate the sale of private property to prevent racial discrimination: "[42 U.S.C. § 1982] bars all racial discrimination, private as well as public, in the sale or rental of property, and that the statute, thus construed, is a valid exercise of the power of Congress to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment."[1] The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (passed by Congress over the veto of Andrew Johnson) provided the basis for this decision as embodied by 42 U.S.C. § 1982.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held that the United States Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens.
Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court limiting the power of Congress to make laws under the Thirteenth Amendment. Three white men had been convicted in the Eastern Arkansas District Court for conspiring against black sawmill workers.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had ruled that racial segregation laws were constitutional as long as the facilities for each race were equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal".
Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 581 (1872), is a United States Supreme Court case that upheld a Kentucky law prohibiting African Americans from testifying against white defendants.
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, ruling that the U.S. Bill of Rights did not limit the power of private actors or state governments despite the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reversed the federal criminal convictions for the civil rights violations committed in aid of anti-Reconstruction murders.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877.
Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911), was a United States Supreme Court case that overturned the peonage laws of Alabama. Bailey challenged an Alabama law that effectively criminalized leaving a job after receiving an advance payment, arguing that it enforced involuntary labor, but he initially lost a case in the Fuller Court, despite support from the Roosevelt administration.
United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931 (1988), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and involuntary servitude. Ike and Margarethe Kozminski and their son John were accused of enslaving two men on their farm.