Dred at the Controls

"The first is that, because of the symbolic significance of its opinions, the Supreme Court generally gets too much retrospective credit for the things it does right and too much blame for the things it gets wrong. The Supreme Court -- the Taney Court emphatically included -- generally represents the center of elite opinion, and its decisions rarely conflict with the priorities of the governing coalition of the time. To blame the Civil War on a rogue Supreme Court is an easy way out that allows us to ignore a fundamental problem: the extents to which the 1787 Constitution was compromised by slavery and Jacksonian political culture was saturated with white supremacy."

Scott Lemieux in The American Prospect reviews Mark Graber’s Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil.