Dred Scott Decision: One of the Most Infamous Supreme Court Cases of All Times

A. The Scott v. Sanford (Dred Scott) case is one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases of all times, affirming the reach of slavery into the putatively "free territories"

B. This report will examine the background of the case, the decision of the Supreme Court, and its effect

A. Laws regarding freedom for slaves in "free territories"

B. "The Scott suits" Overview

A. The initial lawsuits and results

IV. Critical Response to Supreme Court Decision

A. Contemporary and current reactions

B. Judgments regarding Chief Justice Taney's decision

C. Precedents Established by the case

A. The case represents one of the most unfortunate decisions

handed down by the Supreme Court

B. It set back the cause of abolition for decades and diminished the effort to create exceptions to slavery

The case of Scott v. Sanford, 19 How (60 U.S.) 393 (1857) was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6-7, 1858, by a vote of 7 to 2, with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney writing for the Court and Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis dissenting. The case, as this study demonstrates, stands as one of the most important cases in American constitutional history, pl

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riefs, including Scott's ability to sue in federal court, which raised the issue of a black person's claim to be a citizen of the United States. Sanford's lawyers also offered a proslavery challenge to the Missouri Compromise and to the power of the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories; Sanford's lawyers argued that slaves were private personal property protected by the Constitution and, therefore, Congress has no power to abolish slavery in the territories (Hall, 1992). In this way, the issue was transformed into whether Scott has ever been free due to the moves he undertook with Dr. Emerson. This clearly represented a major challenge to the autonomy and authority of Congress and the relative power of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution and determine if a law passed by Congress met the test of constitutionality (Mason, 1968; McCloskey, 1960). The Court could readily have used the case of Strader v. Graham (1851) to simply endorse the state court decision without considering the merits of the Scott challenge (McCloskey, 1960). However, given the tenor of the times and the increasingly agitated debate over slavery, the Court elected to be somewhat definitively more proactive in rendering its decision an

Category: History - D