Doug64 wrote:No, the Taney court made two huge blunders. If they’d been satisfied with saying that Illinois had a right to declare Scott a free man on account of slavery being illegal in that state but needed some form of due process to achieve that, which Scott’s owner hadn’t received—that Scott could not automatically become free by being brought into the state—they would have been all right. But Taney had to use the opportunity to invent substantive due process by insisting that free states could not free slaves brought within their borders at all.
Taney answered that objection though, it was inconceivable that simply crossing the line into a free state magically constitutes a form of due process adequate to freeing the slave in question.
That would be like saying that, in a state that doesn't allow wrist watches, upon crossing through such on a cross-country vacation, the cops could steal that watch without due process because it was magically not my possession given the state's law.
Obviously that is ridiculous.
Doug64 wrote:That was Taney’s first big blunder, the second was a very parochial reading of history—Blacks had been citizens of a number of states at the time the Constitution was raitifed, and became citizens of the new nation. Of course, in this case Taney could have been acting out of ignorance; that particular truth would have been unpalatable to Southerners, or racist Northerners for that matter, and so not likely to be widespread.
But slaves did have a "legal definition" in state laws, and slaves were defined as the property of another.
So long as that is true, given legal precedent at the time, then the ruling was justified. To say the opposite is to say that there were no "slaves" in the U.S. at all as no legal definition existed to recognize such under any courts of the United States, which is simply untrue.
Fact is, crossing a state border does not magically confer due process adequate enough to deprive a person of their property and slaves were legally defined as property.
Taney was right on this.
It was unpopular because chattel slavery was obviously immoral and unpopular, but that does not mean that Taney was poorly reasoned in his decision, his decision was perfectly sensible.
Doug64 wrote:Depends on how you define “very”—either widespread or deeply resented. Sure, in the future I expect the Supreme Court to make rulings that are very unpopular with a sizable minority or even a small majority of the country. But we’re too closely divided for any ruling to be unpopular with a large majority.
Even in 20 years from now?
I do wonder actually.
Doug64 wrote:I don’t look forward to the day and am unsure of its possibility, though the Left’s attempt to destroy Kavanaugh’s family has made that seem more likely. Mary Chesnut’s comment after secession of how “we have hated each other so” comes to mind.
The feelings are becoming palpable. It does seem that people are starting to hate each other in a real tangible manner, and we even have less in common now than northerners and southerners did back then.