Day 16: Roger Taney

[A18]

Let's try this one more time.

Discuss.

[Sam Spade]

One of the better Justices who totally screwed his legacy by the horrible Dred Scott decision.

[Emsworth]

Taney was an atrocious judge. I need not comment on the extraordinary errors he made in Dred Scott -- to me, his conduct in this case was so terrible, that it outweighs any and all positive aspects of his career.

Even if we ignore Dred Scott, Taney was at best mediocre. He did not have any particularly insightful views on the Constitution. His decisions were, as far as one can see, not guided by any principled reading of the text, but rather by arbitrary personal views. In this regard, he was somewhat like John Marshall, except that his personal views on federalism carried him in one direction, whereas Marshall's views took him the opposite way.

[MaC]

Ignoring Dred Scott v Sanford Taney was a horrible justice that ruled based upon personal beliefs and held no objectivity of the cases before him.  The constitutionality of a case only came up when he agreed with it.

As for the Dred Scott decision his argument was basically that the negroes enjoyed being slaves and it was a healthy was for them to fit into society.

[A18]

I actually don't see as stark a difference between Taney and Marshall on the federalism issue as many do.

I agree, of course, that Dred Scott was an outrageous legal atrocity, and that that alone suffices to make him a horrible person.

However, you do have to give him credit for his heroic vindication of the Great Writ in the face of an overbearing executive, and he did (mercifully) abandon Marshall's irritating practice of writing virtually everything himself.

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Uh, what? Are you drunk or something?

[MaC]

It was notes I took from my class "Taney deemed that blacks were less than human and they liked being slaves..."

of course I don't think that such an offensive statement wouldn't be commonplace in the 1840s, especially by people that owned slaves.