Dred Scott v. Sandford

It's not only an independent body, which it should be, but it is supreme in the sense that it rules supreme over the entirety of society.

So if the court puts out a bad decision in Dred Scott or Plessy or Korematsu or Roe v.

Wade or on a same-sex marriage or whatever, whether

you

In Austria, for example, Hans Kelsen, the legal philosopher, and many of his predecessors, they were looking at the United States, actually.

They were looking at Dred Scott, which was a decision that basically said that Black people who had, because they were descended from slaves in the United States, could never actually become citizens of the United States.

And that led to the Civil War and 14th Amendment overruling all of that.

But Dred Scott and even decisions after the Civil War in which the Supreme Court protected property rights so strongly that it basically was striking down any labor legislation.

Property and contract rights were protected so that labor legislation became unconstitutional during what was known as the Lochner era.

And to a lot of legal philosophers in The European context, these decisions showed the dangers of judicial review.

Then, in 1857, the Supreme Court made a decision that pushed the country even deeper into conflict.

That case was Dred Scott v. Stanford.

Dred Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom after living in places where slavery was prohibited.

But the Supreme Court ruled against him.

Even worse, the court declared that black Americans descended from enslaved people could not be citizens of the United States under the Constitution.

States cannot simply decide that an entire group of people born in the United States do not belong to the nation.

The clause established birthright citizenship for people born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction with limited exceptions.

Most importantly, in the context of Reconstruction, it rejected the central citizenship ruling in Dred Scott.

And this idea goes along with the concept of originalism as a psyop, which I discussed in a recent video.

Originalism is based on a cherry-picking of history and is inherently anti-democratic, because why are we allowing old white racist misogynists from 250 years ago dictate how we should run our country in the year of our lord, 2026? Should it not be up to the people currently alive and actively making up the electorate to determine how to interpret our guiding text? And the reason Frederick Douglass was talking about this is because the first true exercise of the newly established judicial supremacy of the Supreme Court wasn't until the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Not off to a great start.

In that opinion, the Supreme Court gutted a law passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, so approved by the other two branches, that banned slavery in the new territories.

when the promise that, quote, all men are created equal was questioned when it involved black Americans, especially black Americans with guns near the end of the Civil War.

From there, we have to follow the case with Dred Scott and the black codes, and then we have to move to Colfax Massacre and the Cruikshank Ruling.

ultimately arriving at the Supreme Court's decision in 2022, which is the Bruin Test.

And under that test, the laws that once disarmed slaves are now being cited as precedent.

In 1873, the court shut that door too.

And we'll get to that.

So 1857, Dred Scott versus Sanford.

And this is where they narrowed the declaration.

Wasn't he an ESPN too? He was an ESPN anchor.

Today, the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision that might actually have more dire implications than Dred Scott v. Sanford, declared that because of the alchemy of its 19th century predecessors in deciding that corporations had all the rights of people, any restrictions on how these corporate beings spend their money on political advertising are unconstitutional.

In short, the First Amendment, free speech for persons, which went into effect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886.

In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.

But the federal government and Supreme Court often treated these states' protections as interference with federal fugitive slave enforcement.

At the end of the day, free states had very little power to insist on freedom for slaves brought into their states, as in the case of the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Okay, so that's history on the slavery issue, and it turned out that the federal government actually did very little to stand by the free states.

Right.

His administration prosecuted anti-slavery activists, hunted down escaped slaves, and punished anyone who dared help them.

When the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, denying citizenship to Black Americans and declaring slavery could not be restricted anywhere, Pierce applauded.

He said it would end the controversy forever.

It didn’t.

He believed slavery was morally wrong, but also believed the federal government had no right to interfere with it.

That contradiction defined his presidency.

He supported the Dred Scott Decision, even though it effectively declared Black Americans had no rights at all.

He pressured the Supreme Court behind the scenes to reach its infamous conclusion, a fact that only emerged later.

For Black people in the nineteenth century, the question of whether they were or could ever be citizens of the United States was part of a decade-long court battle that centered on the circumstances of a Black man named Dred Scott.

Though Scott's case, which ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court as Scott v. Sanford, was initially about whether one man would be able to live his life as free or enslaved, it became something much larger, centered on the very prospect and possibility of Black citizenship.

Let's check it out.

[rock music] The person at the center of this case, Dred Scott, was an enslaved Black man who was living in Missouri.

This decision created a new legal precedent that solidified Black Americans' status as an underclass.

It kept them from being able to vote, from being able to defend themselves against explicit discrimination, or even domestic terrorism at the hands of white Americans.

Black Americans were sometimes successful in court after Scott v. Sanford, but that wasn't the norm, and Black people were now legally barred from filing suits at the federal level.

What this did was limit the mobility of their cases.