Dred Scott V. Sandford - Later References

Later References

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized racial segregation and created the concept of “separate but equal.” In his dissent Harlan wrote that the majority’s opinion would “prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”

Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott v. Sandford as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for over a decade.

In a memo to Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952 (for whom he was clerking at the time) on the subject of Brown v. Board of Education, future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that "Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."

Justice Antonin Scalia made the comparison between Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Dred Scott in an effort to see Roe v. Wade overturned:

red Scott...rested upon the concept of "substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for...Roe v. Wade.

Scalia noted that the Dred Scott decision, written and championed by Roger B. Taney, left the justice's reputation irrevocably tarnished. Taney, while attempting to end the disruptive question of the future of slavery, wrote a decision that aggravated sectional tensions and was considered to contribute to the American Civil War.