(Pronounced TAWNey, BTW)
Actually he had a pretty good reputation prior to Dred Scott. I think his logic in the decision was pretty good; and the case was decided 7-2. But then "Honest Abe" started a war to overturn the decision.
ML/NJ
No, it’s not. It is exactly as standard English letters imply. It’s TANE EE.
No. Have you ever read Dred Scott? It’s legislating for slavery by the bendy and it’s patently absured, using logic that makes Roe v Wade/Doe v Bolton and the current interpretations of the Commerce clause seem tame and restrained by comparison. (Roe v Wade was actually somewhat constrained; Doe v Bolton was the truly insane one that established a right to abortion.)
This is a good description of Dred Scott:
“Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion ... ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution, and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted. He admitted that African Americans could be citizens of a particular state and that they might even be able to vote, as they in fact did in some states. But he argued that state citizenship had nothing to do with national citizenship and that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Scott’s suit, therefore, should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the district court. On this point, however, Taney stood on shaky constitutional ground: if even one state considered an African American a citizen, then the Constitution required that all states, and by inference also the federal government, had to accord that person “all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” (Article IV, Section 2), which includes the right to sue in federal court. Furthermore, Article III, which establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts, does not mention national citizenship but rather declares that “the judicial Power” shall extend, among other things, “to Controversies…between Citizens of different States” (the so-called “diversity jurisdiction”).
“Thus Taney continued, holding that Scott had never been free and that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. ... Even the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state—lacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thus voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories and in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty...
[Me: So much for states’ rights. All future states must be slave states, according to Taney.]
“Curtis in particular undercut most of Taney’s historical arguments, showing that African Americans had voted in a number of states at the founding. “At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation,” he wrote:
All free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens.
“Thus, Curtis argued, they were members of the nation and could not now be denied the right to claim citizenship.”
[So much for the doctrine of original intent and the plain meaning of words.]