Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Logic and Legacy of Dred Scott: Marshall, Taney, and the Sublimation of Republican Thought

1989; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 3; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0898588x00000626

1469-8692

Róbert Meister,

Historical Economic and Legal Thought

The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.