Worst SCOTUS cases

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

@ Antonio, BK and Inks -
It is also a factually inaccurate depiction of the history. It is ironic that Inks bemoans us applying modern biases onto the Dred Scott decision, when in reality that is exactly what the Supreme Court was doing in 1857, applying the biases of Southern politicians from that 1850's onto the 1780's.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This is factually innaccurate as they were in fact treated as such in Massachusetts stemming from the 1780 Constitution and subsequent interprations by the State Supreme Judicial Court in the years following its adoption. These were prior to 1787. There were other examples as well, that Justice Curtis points to in his dissent, but MA is the best case study in my opinion. It was suits by blacks in court that led to interpretations by state's highest court to determine that slavery was illegal in the state, prior to the convention in 1787. Brom and Bett v. Ashley, followed by Quock Walker's suit, which cited the former case as proof that the Constituion of 1780 barred slavery by declaring that "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quock_Walker#The_cases

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Such as citizenship, Mr. Chief Justice?

If the Constitution of the United States grandfathered in all of the citizens under the Articles and if the Articles of Confederation left that determination up to the states and then a single state had given such citizenship (determined by the ability of blacks to sue in court if by nothing else), then how could said Constitution have denied blacks citizenship if such isn't expressly stated in the document (and it isn't)? The only basis for denying blacks citizenship is for Taney and his collegues to have 1) ignored these historical facts and then 2) conjectured as to what the opinions of the Convention members were in order to provide a answer to a question they were pretending was not easily answered.

Having multitple different standards of citizenship was not the crux of the matter Inks, though Justice Curtis' dissent does reference that later on. The primary issue in the first part of the rulling centers around whether or not the Constitution denied them citizenship and as far as I can see, Curtis' opinion is correct.

One has to remember that the extent of the racism at play grew over time. In Thomas Jefferson's time, slavery was considered as an evil that was dying of its own accord. In the 1820's, it was a considered a "necessary evil", thanks to the growth of cotton after invention of the Cotton Gin. Around this time period, you had a shift in Southern churches, who had been critical of slavery prior to the switch, but now switched and began to promote it as a means to "civilize" blacks, mostly to keep their flocks coming. They didn't appreciate being told they were going to hell because they owned slaves. The changed in the church, as well as the reaction to Nat Turner's rebellion created a new generation of Southern politicians who thought that not only was slavery not immoral, but that was in fact a moral, civilizing institution. That was the view of Jefferson Davis. John C. Calhoun and likely Chief Justice Roger B. Taney as well, shifted from the "necessary evil" opinion that defined their generation of southern politicians and came into line with the view of the 1850's. There is a quote from Calhoun from 1838 indicating this shift of opinion and the extent to which it was a generalized trend amongst southern politicians.  

The people of this "de-generation" of Southern politicans were desperate. It is hard to describe them as anything else. As you move closer to the Civil War, their demands and their views became more extreme, more demanding and less alligned with any kind of principles. They willingly embraced things like states rights to protect the slave states, and then abandoned them (some went as far as to insist that only through the embrace of slavery by the north, could the South's rights be preserved), when it served their purpose. I can't see Dred Scott v. Sanford, as anything more then an appropriation of the Highest Court in the land for the effecting of this process.

Thus I get to nine:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This was the height of hypocrisy and in my view, the classic case of covering yourself by accusing someone else of doing the exact same thing that you are doing.

In my view, the Supreme Court was projecting its own biases onto the Constitutional Convention for the purposes of convenience. There were states that granted as much as the right to vote to blacks in the 1787, and nothing in the Constitution strips these persons of that right. The insinuation otherwise is that Elbridge Gerry and his collegues from MA, were either voting in ignorance of the consequences for some of their state's citizens or willfully voting to strip person's within their states, or that well known Abolitionists such as Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were purposely affixing themselves to a document that would have forceably implanted on a group of states, views of slave owners regarding who was and was not a citizen in those said states. Considering the debates in the convention that occured over the three-fifths compromise, and other such sectional issues, I find that completely ridiculous.

If anything, the delegates of the convention were envisioning an America one day free of slavery, but that for the moment they thought best path towards that end was to structure a union that could stand the tests of time and in the process correct its own mistakes, even if that meant accepting the three-fifths compromise as a way to get started on that road without a breakup. That would certainly be more reflective of the true views of Washington, Franklin and many of the other delegates there. Regardless, as it is irrelevant to the intent of the Constitution and unless the Constitution specifies exemption to the clauses that grandfather in the citizens under the Articles, there is no way any reasonable construction could hold that it denied citizenship to blacks.

Of the Court at that time, only four of the justices were Northerners and only one of them was not a Democrat (Curtis). At least one of the Northern Democrats was pressured into joining the majority by the President, James Buchanan, who violated the seperation of powers with abandon as he desperately (Buchanan was of northern man of southern principles, even his tastes in boyfriends were Southern), in a misguided attempt to "end the issue forever", thought putting a northerner in with the Southerners comprising the majority, would add to its legitimacy.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I'm not really familiar with the Dred Scott ruling apart from the right to property bit. How exactly did the court come up with this notion that blacks (including those who were free) could never be US citizens? I don't see any possible legal rationale to justify it.

The majority opinion's summary of its own legal rationale:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

From a purely legal standpoint... that sounds like utter nonsense to me.

So the rationale is basically "a US citizen now is someone who was a US citizen when the constitution was ratified". Huh... why exactly? Where in the Constitution does it say that?

How the hell can you even determine who is a "citizen" and who is a "foreigner" based on whether or not they would have been at the time? So does that mean immigrants who became citizens after the ratification of the Constitution actually are not citizens? What about their children? They shouldn't be citizens either if we follow that logic. And what about someone who's the son of an immigrant and of a citizen?

Seriously, disregarding any moral consideration, this might be the most blatantly stupid ruling I've ever seen.

The rationale is that only someone who was a US citizen at ratification is a citizen, or people who the federal government has made citizens are citizens.  The majority's argument was that states could make people citizens of their own state, but this does not necessarily mean that they are Federal citizens.  Federal citizenship can only be defined by the Federal government.  Federal citizenship is an issue that the federal government, not the state government, must determine.  It would be ridiculous to think that States could have different criteria for who was a U.S. citizen; otherwise immigrants could go to states with easy citizenship definitions and become U.S. citizens.

You seem to be narrowly focused on this issue of "federal citizenship versus state citizenship", and use that as the basis for disagreeing with the dissent. Yet that wasn't even the main thrust of the dissent, a dissent which sough to challenge every point of the majority's opinion (Have you read the Curtis Dissent in full?). It also sought to establish that some states did in fact do so at ratification, contrary to the historical "facts" embraced by the majority opinion. I don't see how even after acknowledging what you say above as the truth, one could come up with the first part of the Dred Scott rulling, as I detailed in my previous post. If you could vote and sue in court, then wouldn't that imply citizenship? If so, and if just one state allowed such at ratification, they would have been grandfathered in as US Citizens, no? Thus meaning that the Constitution couldn't have denied them citizenship on the basis of "no state considered them as such, at the time?"

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I have nothing to add to NCY's excellent rebuttal, but I must say I really don't get why Inks seems to care so much about defending Dred Scott. Of course a morally awful decision is not necessarily legally incorrect... but Dred Scott was blatantly both.

You could probably find minor aspects of the decision that were sound, but there is certainly no justification not only for the entirety of the second half of the ruling, which if nothing else stands as a gigantic adminission of bias on the part of the justices (since it just happened to be the prevailing position and demand of the most extreme Southern politicans at the time, yet we are trust them on the historical record and determination of original construction in the first half? like hell!), but also the primary basis for first half denying free blacks citizenship through a convoluted process of first ignoring the historical record, not only in MA, but also other states, as well as then proceeding to substitute in its absence the wild conjectures of biased Southern politicians onto the motivations of the founders as a flawed means of discovering "original" construction, which for obvious reasons would not work to provide a true discovery of such since it was the product of a flawed process.

I think the second half of the ruling pertaining to the Missouri compromise is the product of Buchanan's meddling and his desire to "settle the issue" in this manner. We can establish that he was deeply involved in the case, to the extent that no President should ever be involved in the jurisprudence on the part of Supreme Court Justices, we know he corresponded with Taney and other Justices on the matter, that he directly swayed the opinions of at least one northern Democratic justice who was on the fence so that it wouldn't be a bunch of Southerners and a token Northerner forming the opinion, and his inaugural address even stated something to the effect of "The issue of slavery will soon be forever put to rest by the Supreme Court".  

Worth pointing out that Dred Scott was one of the reasons that the Fourteenth Amendment would end up including birthright citizenship, to make it absolutely clear and unambiguous that the descendants of slaves were US citizens.

Yes, and we certainly needed a citizenship amendment. However, I do find it unfortunate that Dred Scott never got overturned by a later court (its equivalent of Brown v. Board of Education), since virtually all of its legal basis was flawed and the process of its consideration and independence during such, was tainted by the interefence of the Executive branch.

What Dred Scott illustrates more then anything with regards to the Court, is the need to preseve its independence from the political whims of the day regardless of which party they originate from (thus no to term limits), from the influences of the executive branch, and the need for the appointment of judges who will adhere as strictly as possible to not only the Constitution and precedents (that are likewise based of an independently analysed assessment of the constitution and prior precedents before it), but also as unbiased an interpretation of original intent as possible. Perhaps no other branch can be as dangerous if its power is abused, nor is as difficult to correct its mistakes as that of the Supreme Court and thus I would hope that liberals could embrace at least some degree of conservatism with regards to its function. Once a rulling is given, that is it  until a subsequent decision overturns it (which takes either a completely membership change, which had taken place by the 1860's), or a Constitutional Amendment, the process for which is obviously very challenging.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think the second half of the ruling pertaining to the Missouri compromise is the product of Buchanan's meddling and his desire to "settle the issue" in this manner. We can establish that he was deeply involved in the case, to the extent that no President should ever be involved in the jurisprudence on the part of Supreme Court Justices, we know he corresponded with Taney and other Justices on the matter, that he directly swayed the opinions of at least one northern Democratic justice who was on the fence so that it wouldn't be a bunch of Southerners and a token Northerner forming the opinion, and his inaugural address even stated something to the effect of "The issue of slavery will soon be forever put to rest by the Supreme Court".  

Wow, I didn't know that.

I think Buchanan now automatically rockets up to "number one worst President ever".  Not that he was anywhere but safely ensconced in the  Bottom 5 already, but this makes it so, so unambiguous.

I think Buchanan was always the worst in most historian rankings.

I've read about his correspondence with the justices as well... wasn't he trying to sway a fellow Pennsylvanian? The name escapes me.

Yes, there were four supreme court justices from the North, but because the Whig Presidents always seem to die in office and one of the VPs wasn't even really a Whig (Tyler), only one of them was not a Democrat, Justice Curtis of Massachusetts. Another lesson of the ruling is the impact of what the danger of a lopsided court in nominal politics can mean for putting the court at risk of undo political influence. The other dissenter was Justice McLean of Ohio, who was a Democrat at the time of his appointment but would become a Republican, a transition I don't think he had yet made in 1857 if memory serves. I am not familiar with the details of his dissent. Edit: While both agree to a large extent, Curtis is a good read on the issue of whether or not blacks were considered citizens, as opposed to McLean who just said "states allowed them as citizens by virtue of allowing them to vote", as opposed to detailing which ones and why like Curtis does. On the other hand, McLean delves more into the state sovereignty issue, and how prior precedent had upheld the doctrine of "once free, always free" and had given recognition to the laws of other states and goes into detail about how the MO Supreme Court overturned that as well as 30 years of precedent to reach the rulling that it did in Dred Scott v. Emerson. Both complement each other on the merits of the ruling regarding the MO Compromise.

The other two were Northern Democrats, one from Pennsylvania and the other from New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

What Dred Scott illustrates more then anything with regards to the Court, is the need to preseve its independence from the political whims of the day regardless of which party they originate from (thus no to term limits), from the influences of the executive branch, and the need for the appointment of judges who will adhere as strictly as possible to not only the Constitution and precedents (that are likewise based of an independently analysed assessment of the constitution and prior precedents before it), but also as unbiased an interpretation of original intent as possible.

This was pretty much the exact thrust of the essay I just completed.

I want to point out though that it wasn't just the "four workmen" of the Democratic Party who helped politicize the Court (Douglas, Buchanan, Pierce, and Taney). Tying the Supreme Court to geographic circuits definitely helped ensure that Southern interests would be overrepresented on the bench, but abolitionist hacks did make their way into the Court as well. For example, John McLean basically spent his entire career as a justice campaigning for the presidency. Dred Scott was his last chance to pander to whatever group he thought would support him. The bottom line is that these people were more interested in pursuing their own interests than actually making a reasoned judgment. The scope of Dred Scott did not have to be as large as Taney made it (the Court would have been much better off if it had issued an opinion like Justice Nelson's, which only really dealt in the specifics of Dred Scott's appeal), but Taney wanted to make a political statement. Add to that the fact that Congress was more than willing to offload the slavery question to the Supreme Court, and you've got a situation where America's highest judicial authority descended into politics. I'd agree that Scott v. Sandford was probably the Court's worst decision, but not really because of the racism in Taney's ruling. Dred Scott represented the worst of the Court, in that it was a symbol of how the justices had lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing and who they were supposed to be representing—The People.

As eggregious as McLean's behavior was, it is rather useless to point to his biases, when his opinion wasn't the opinion of the court and thus had the force of law. Be that as it may, he certainly was guilty of using the bench for political purposes; however, there are no consequences to speak of (at least in terms of this case save for perhaps ironically a more sound legal opinon then the majorities).

I never stated it was the worst based on racism in the opinion. It was the 1850's, everbody was racist. Even the abolitionists wanted to "civilize" the slaves. It is the worst ruling, because it was in conflict with the Constitution and precedent in many different aspects of the ruling, a discrepancy which was motivated by sectional and political bias (which in this case happened to be racist), the consequences of which were rather devasting to the country and to the standing of the court.