[lentulusgracchus]

Taney tried to do what he saw as best for the country. And what he thought best was to shut down all discussion and controversy with regard to slavery, by making it the unchallenged law of the land. There was a method to his madness.

I think it was called "interpretation". Or even more simply, "reading". In this case, reading the Service clause of Article IV, Section 2. The Northern States had been practicing a form of nullification, and he broke their china, just as Andy Jackson had broken the Virginians' and Carolinians' china during the Nullification Crisis 25 years earlier.

Today we would call it judicial activism.

I disagree, I don't think he engaged in legal positivism to arrive at his conclusion.

Then, it was a precursor to civil war.

It was the trigger that forced Abraham Lincoln to choose one good over another. War was his policy, as I've said.

[capitan_refugio]

"It was the trigger that forced Abraham Lincoln to choose one good over another. War was his policy, as I've said."

The Dred Scott decision was delivered well before Lincoln was on the national scene (unless, perhaps, you consider his one term in Congress to be "national"). It was the DSD, as "an astonisher in legal history" that led Lincoln to contest Douglas for a Senate seat, and eventually to the Presidency.

"I don't think he engaged in legal positivism to arrive at his conclusion."

If natural law theory is based on the concept that there exist moral constraints on the content of the law (in opposition to the positivist theory), I don't see how you could conclude that Taney was other than both activist and positivist in his expansive decision.