But that was the least of the problems with Taney's decision. When he decided he could solve all the sectional differences over the spread of slavery by doning his black robe and nullifying long established law with a stroke of his pen, he drove the nation over the cliff and set the stage for all the smart lawyers to come that they too could twist the clear intent of the Constitution into their desired political outcome.
You keep saying "established law" but you keep overlooking that it was established by states, and not by a federal decision. You also overlook the fact that it was "established" in those states for a much shorter time period than was the previous law.
If you look at the Massachusetts Freedom cases, and you have any objectivity, you realize immediately that they are pulling a fast one with the truth.
They cite their newly created state constitution which basically borrows it's words from the Declaration of Independence (All men are created equal) and then use it in as an ex post facto law to strike down what was then well established and understood law that slaves did not have such rights.
And now you are suggesting that we regard this deliberate sophistry in overturning what were the actually established laws, as something that should be respected by the Federal Courts because they had been "established"?
That is a legal and logical "two-step." It is a chain of nonsense masquerading as a legal argument, just as is this recent decision by the Supreme Court to force Christians to provide "gay" marriage licenses.
In fact, this is the exact same phenomena. Liberal Judicial activists in Massachusetts deliberately misread the actual law and made it say something it doesn't really mean, and then forced everyone else to obey their made up meaning, and Liberal Judges in the USSC deliberately misread the actual law, and make it to say something it doesn't really say, and then force everyone else to obey their made up meaning.
So now you are blaming Tanney for arriving at a decision that appears to me is completely consistent with that requirement of Article IV in the US Constitution?
As I have pointed out, the "Union Compact" requires states to respect the slave laws of other states. What this means is that you cannot free slaves held by the laws of other states. It explicitly says that all state laws designed to free slaves held by the laws of other states are NULL AND VOID.
Now I don't grasp how you think you can just ignore that. I don't see how you can just wish that away. It's meaning seems clear, and I am at a loss as to how you can even read that clause differently.
You keep SAYING Tanney's decision was twisting the meaning of the Constitution, but I don't see that at all. What I see are various states twisting the meaning, and Tanney setting them straight as to the evilness baked into the US Constitution in regard to slavery.
Like it or not, that is what the document says. If they were following the law, the first thing they should have done was to introduce a Constitutional Amendment to repeal that portion of Article IV.
Without that, the non-slave states do not have a legal leg to stand on. Their state efforts to make slavery illegal were effectively blocked by the Federal Constitution.