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Law and Politics Reconsidered: A New Constitutional History of Dred Scott

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Gerald Leonard
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Abstract

This essay synthesizes recent writing on the constitutional history of slavery, featuring Mark Graber's Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006). It offers a historical and legal analysis of Dred Scott that attempts to clarify the roles of both law and politics in controversial judicial decisions. It joins Graber in rehabilitating Chief Justice Taney's Dred Scott opinion as a plausible implementation of a Constitution that was born in slavery and grew only more suffused with slavery over time. It integrates much recent writing on the social, political, and constitutional history of slavery to develop the context in which the Dred Scott opinions must be read. And it finds that Justice Curtis's celebrated dissent amounted to an unjudicial manipulation of the law, albeit for the higher purpose of striking at the political hegemony of the slaveholding class.

This essay is an abridgement of a longer work (Leonard 2009) that offers, among other things, further analysis of the unjudicial character of Curtis's dissent.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 747 - 785
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2009 

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Statutes Cited

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, 1 Stat. 302 (February 12, 1793).Google Scholar
Judiciary Act of 1789, 1 Stat. 73 (September 24, 1789).Google Scholar
Kansas‐Nebraska Act of 1854, 10 Stat. 277 (May 30, 1854).Google Scholar