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Dred Scott V. Sandford Case Analysis

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Today, the United States Supreme Court is regularly lambasted for many of the decisions it makes, and the phrase “worst decision in history” is regularly thrown around. The polarized political climate in the United States combined with a twenty four hour media cycle helps push this perspective, but in reality the vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are not nearly as good or bad as the public wants to believe. Of course, there are exceptions, especially historical ones. The landmark 1857 case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford is an outstanding example of a Supreme Court decision that was both as horrible as it seems, as well as impactful for a large amount of people in the United States, directly. This paper will analyze the Dred Scott decision, …show more content…
For Scott, the facts of the case were simple. At the time of the lawsuit, Dred Scott lived in Missouri, which had a policy towards slaves which held that if a slave had spent prolonged time in a free territory, they would become automatically free upon returning to Missouri (Whittington, 2001). Known as “once free, always free”, Dred Scott believed that this applied to him due to the fact that he had spent significant time living in Wisconsin when he was owned by John Emerson. However, the defense claimed that Dred Scott was never owned by Mrs. Emerson, and that relationship was hearsay, which they believed invalidated the concept of “once free, always free” (Levinson, 2007). With this set of facts, the trial went forth at the St. Louis federal-state …show more content…
Sandford. The first issue was whether or not the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was Constitutional, or whether Congress had acted illegally in passing it. This was an important issue because if the Missouri Compromise (which held that in free states, non-white individuals could be given their freedom) was constitutional, Dred Scott would have been granted his freedom due to the fact that the Compromise allowed for slaves that entered free territories to become free (Graber, 2006). On this issue, the Supreme Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and represented an overreach by Congress. Essentially here, the Supreme Court was arguing about whether or not it had jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place, or if Dred Scott had no standing to come before federal court to file his lawsuit (Levinson, 2007). The Court found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, invalidated an act of Congress for the first time since Marbury vs. Madison, thus punching a major hole in Dred Scott’s attempts to win his

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