Dred Scott v. Sandford strips Black Americans of citizenship

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that people of African descent could not be citizens of the United States and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the territories. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Black Americans had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'

The decision was overturned by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments after the Civil War, but its reasoning shaped the constitutional doctrine of race for the next century. The case remains a foundational reference in citizenship law.

The procedural posture of Dred Scott matters as much as the holding. Dred Scott and Harriet Scott had been brought by their owner from the slave state of Missouri into the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory, then returned to Missouri. Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri state court in 1846, arguing that residency in free jurisdictions had emancipated him under the doctrine of 'once free, always free' that several earlier Missouri cases had recognized. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed that precedent in 1852, ruling against Scott. The case moved to federal court under diversity-of-citizenship jurisdiction, which is where the citizenship question came in: the federal courts could only hear the case if Scott was a citizen capable of suing in federal court. Chief Justice Taney's holding that Scott could not be a citizen was, in form, a ruling on federal-court jurisdiction. The Court did not need to reach the substantive question of slavery in the territories to dispose of the case. That it did reach that question is what made the decision a constitutional intervention rather than a routine appeal.

The Court's ruling on the Missouri Compromise was the second prong. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had prohibited slavery in federal territories north of the 36 degrees 30 minutes parallel. The Court held the prohibition unconstitutional as a deprivation of property without due process under the Fifth Amendment. This was the second time in American history the Supreme Court struck down an act of Congress as unconstitutional, the first being Marbury v. Madison in 1803. The Court's willingness to extend judicial review to invalidate a politically settled compromise represented a substantial expansion of judicial power and was understood as such by contemporaries on both sides of the slavery question.

Reaction to the decision was immediate and structurally consequential. Republican Party leaders, including a then-relatively-obscure Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, organized the 1858 Senate campaign in Illinois around the decision's reasoning. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of that fall returned repeatedly to whether the Court's reasoning could be limited to the territories or whether, as Lincoln argued, it implied that no state could lawfully prohibit slavery within its own borders. Northern free-soil voters increasingly accepted Lincoln's reading and elected him to the presidency in 1860. The South seceded in response. Dred Scott is conventionally taught as one of the most direct doctrinal antecedents of the American Civil War.

The legal afterlife of Dred Scott is the more important part for the platform's purposes. The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 abolished slavery and rendered the substantive holding obsolete. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 directly overruled the citizenship holding by establishing that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. The Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 prohibited racial denial of the franchise. Dred Scott is thus the canonical example of a Supreme Court decision overturned by constitutional amendment rather than by later judicial action.

The doctrinal reasoning, however, has had a longer half-life than the holding. Modern citizenship-clause cases continue to cite Dred Scott in the negative — as the wrong the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to undo. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the foundational case for birthright citizenship of American-born children of non-citizen parents, treats Dred Scott as the constitutional error the citizenship clause definitively buried. Twenty-first-century debates about birthright citizenship and the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment continue to reference the case as the boundary marker. For readers approaching American citizenship law for the first time, Dred Scott is the case the Fourteenth Amendment was written against, and the reasoning is worth reading on its own terms to understand what was being rejected.

The place of Dred Scott in modern constitutional pedagogy is the platform's secondary interest in the case. Constitutional-law textbooks treat Dred Scott as one of the principal anti-canon cases — a decision that the modern constitutional consensus rejects in its substantive holding while studying it carefully for its reasoning. The case is paired in most constitutional-law curricula with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Korematsu v. United States (1944), and Lochner v. New York (1905) as the canonical four anti-canonical cases of American constitutional jurisprudence. Modern Supreme Court opinions cite Dred Scott principally in the negative — as the constitutional error subsequent doctrine was developed to prevent. The case's continuing pedagogical presence in the constitutional curriculum reflects the broader documentary commitment to keeping the doctrinal failures of the constitutional past visible in the constitutional training of the constitutional present.

The historiographical literature on Dred Scott extends across more than 150 years of scholarly engagement. Don Fehrenbacher's 'The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics' (1978), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history, remains the standard modern treatment. Mark Graber's 'Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil' (2006) argues that the decision was a substantively defensible reading of the constitutional framework as it stood in 1857 and that the constitutional framework itself was the source of the moral failure. The competing scholarly assessments continue to shape the modern discussion of constitutional originalism, the moral commitments of constitutional interpretation, and the relationship between constitutional text and constitutional outcomes.