I think it’s a poor article which fails to highlight Taney’s judicial activism in striking down the Missouri compromise of 1820 as a superfluous expansion of his opinion on Dred- Scott. My understanding from reading Jaffe is that it was the first use of judicial review since Marbury vs. Madison.
It us also reasonable to note that in the Dred Scott opinion Taney distorted history and flat-out lied about a number of things. As was pointed out in the dissents.
The DS decision had a great deal in common with the Roe v Wade decision.
In both cases, the Supremes decided to impose their own moral values on the nation to shortcut a political process that wasn’t reaching the results they thought it should. So they just invented stuff as being in the Constitution that simply isn’t there.
The Constitution says nothing whatsoever about color. But Taney saw penumbras and emanations in it that meant people of color were not and could never become citizens of the United States.
And totally ignored the Northwest Ordinance which the Consititution affirmed and the 1st Congress made up of Framers of the Constitution ratified during their first session. That is even aside from ignoring the historical fact that free blacks in some states could and infact did vote in five of the thirteen states for the ratification of the Constitution.
Taney with the Scott decision set the bar for 'Activist Courts' that was not surpassed until Roe v. Wade.