No, it's considered quite bad. Most scholars will agree that Justice Taney could have decided the case on much narrower grounds and arguably could have easily simply dismissed the case without a decision on slavery's legality. But that was not Taney's goal. Taney wanted to end the debate over slavery once and for all by saying "yes, slavery is constitutional and the federal govt. has no power to stop its spread." Remember, this was 1857. The country had gone through many ups and downs on the slavery issue and there were many who hoped the Court could end the uncertainty. That said, no Supreme Court ruling can be directly linked to a body count as much as Dredd Scott. That's not to say Dredd Scott started the war. But it did help us get there.

There are three big holdings in the case:

1. No slave or any decendant of slaves are citizens of the U.S. nor can they be ever be made citizens.

2. Congress, i.e the Federal govt., has no authority to govern territories of the U.S. unless that territory was part of the U.S. in 1789.

3. No slave can be freed by the govt. because this would be a deprivation of rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

So, it's not too hard to knock down these conclusions:

1. Blacks and freed slaves had a history of citizenship in the United States predating the Constitution, despite Taney's argument that the Constitution never meant to include blacks. There was no basis in history for that view. So, to say that the Framers intended that blacks never be citizens requires ignoring the fact that many Framers came from states where blacks were indeede citizens.

2. This is considered an absolute joke. Similar to #1, this ignored the context in which the Framers' drafted the Constitution. Congress was given the power to govern territories in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785, which predates the Constitution. So, again, it seems odd that the Framers would have intended to limit Congress' ability to govern territories when the same people had given Congress that power just a few years before the Constitution was drafted. Further, it's a laughable conclusion: If Congress / the feds cannot govern territories -- who can?

3. Taney basically argues that the Constitution protects private property and that slaves are private property. This one has more constitutional backing. Yes, slaves could be considered propery with a strict textual reading of the Consitution. Nowhere does it say that they CANNOT be considered property. That said, this vagueness was intentional. While the Framers did not mention that slaves were property, it also did not explicitly protect slaveowners' property right in slaves. So, Taney could have gone either way on this one and, since he set out to forever protect slavery, he chose the interpetation of the Constitution that fit that goal.

More reading here - http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1801&context=fss_papers

The short answer is no.

The longer answer involves a huge amount of background. Suffice it to say, Chief Justice Taney massively overstepped his bounds in invalidating huge swathes of preexisting common law. He claimed that blacks were not and could not be citizens of the United States, and never had been. This is simply an outright lie. A deliberate falsehood. Blacks were voting citizens in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New Hampshire when the Articles of Confederation were established. This was the government that created the Northwest Ordinance that Taney tore to shreds. They continued to vote, and were recognized as citizens, in many Northern states off and on from that time.

Taney made the decision as an overtly political attempt to "solve" the slavery question. He decided to do this by ripping up the Missouri compromise and essentially transforming every state into a slave state. Despite decades of precedent, apparently not even being born free in a free state could make a black man a free citizen.