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...This is why we have a SCOTUS.

ceejayoz 10y ago
SCOTUS are just as capable of bad decisions as other federal judges. They're not magical, and we get stuff like Citizens United and Dred Scott.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  Plessy v. Ferguson, too.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > They're not magical, and we get stuff like Citizens United and Dred Scott. Leaving aside CU right now, I'm less convinced that Dred Scott was a bad judicial decision than I am that it reflected the fundamentally irreconcilably bad state of the Constitutional order when you have entities that, depending on which subordinate jurisdictions law applies to them, may be either chattel or persons with all the rights and privileges attendant thereto. As much as the founders tried to make it work to cover up the deep divisions that existed in the early US, the basic structure of government set up under the Constitution just doesn't work well when the basic definition of "what is a person vs. what is property" isn't consistent across the states. That's not to say that there isn't an argument that Dred Scott was wrongly decided, just that the usual argument (which focuses on the immorality, from a modern viewpoint, of the result) sort of ignores the fact that any system in which slavery is part of the law will necessarily produce results abhorrent to modern morality.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    The problem with Dred Scott wasn't the ruling that SCOTUS was asked to rule on, namely, what the status of a slave was when an owner moved from a slave state to a free state. That aspect of the decision is fairly defensible under the given law (basically, you can argue that automatically emancipating the slave equated to an illegal, uncompensated taking of property). Odious, but defensible. The problem of Dred Scott was that SCOTUS basically went on to argue that blacks, even freed slaves, weren't citizens and could never be citizens, and also argued that slavery could not be banned in any manner whatsoever by any level of government. It was a pretty naked attempt to tell the abolitionists "Slavery exists, and there's nothing you can do about it. Deal with it."

SCOTUS are just as capable of bad decisions as other federal judges. They're not magical, and we get stuff like Citizens United and Dred Scott.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago
Plessy v. Ferguson, too.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> They're not magical, and we get stuff like Citizens United and Dred Scott. Leaving aside CU right now, I'm less convinced that Dred Scott was a bad judicial decision than I am that it reflected the fundamentally irreconcilably bad state of the Constitutional order when you have entities that, depending on which subordinate jurisdictions law applies to them, may be either chattel or persons with all the rights and privileges attendant thereto. As much as the founders tried to make it work to cover up the deep divisions that existed in the early US, the basic structure of government set up under the Constitution just doesn't work well when the basic definition of "what is a person vs. what is property" isn't consistent across the states. That's not to say that there isn't an argument that Dred Scott was wrongly decided, just that the usual argument (which focuses on the immorality, from a modern viewpoint, of the result) sort of ignores the fact that any system in which slavery is part of the law will necessarily produce results abhorrent to modern morality.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  The problem with Dred Scott wasn't the ruling that SCOTUS was asked to rule on, namely, what the status of a slave was when an owner moved from a slave state to a free state. That aspect of the decision is fairly defensible under the given law (basically, you can argue that automatically emancipating the slave equated to an illegal, uncompensated taking of property). Odious, but defensible. The problem of Dred Scott was that SCOTUS basically went on to argue that blacks, even freed slaves, weren't citizens and could never be citizens, and also argued that slavery could not be banned in any manner whatsoever by any level of government. It was a pretty naked attempt to tell the abolitionists "Slavery exists, and there's nothing you can do about it. Deal with it."